I posted the other day about how pee’d off I was to let my newly-acquired Dornblüth 99.1 go to a new home; as many have found before me, at 42mm it really does wear quite large, and – much as I liked it – I knew that in reality it was too big for me. Anyway, on Wednesday I met up with Kirk and Andrzej, some mates from TZ-UK, for one of our regular chats over a coffee in Radlett and Kirk bought along his Kal 04.0, just to rub salt into the wound.

Now, this is a genuinely rare watch; only one year of production (2006) and in total 75 pieces were made, of which 50 were in stainless steel and 25 in rose gold. With a very wearable 38mm case, the other striking difference to Dornblüth’s other models is that the internals in these are based on a GUB movement from some time around the early 90’s (not sure exactly when, but I’m about to mail Dirk Dornblüth to ask him). I quote from the Interweb:

The 04.0 caliber is based upon a small cache of antique movement parts produced in Germany by GUB. Largely reworked and augmented with other parts (some manufactured in-house) by D.Dornblüth & Sohn, it bears these attributes: 29.4 mm diameter; 3.8 mm height; 18 rubies; power reserve 36 hours (+/- 5%); 18,000 semi-oscillations per hour; rose gold three-quarter plate with yellow gold hand-graving of manufactory name and serial number; Geneva stripe finish; retracing ratchet; double sunburst finish on the crown wheels; flat polished, heat-blued screws with beveled edges; Glucydur screw balance with Nivarox 1 spring; swan-neck fine adjustment on the hand-engraved balance cock. [Gold chatons too – Ed]

The applied numerals are black steel whilst the hands are blued, and all in all it really is a wonderful watch. I’d been looking at/reading about them for a couple of years, but after realising how scarce they are pretty much gave up on finding one. Just trying it on was actually an unexpected pleasure, so I gave Kirk a withering look and advised him in no uncertain terms that my name was as good as on it.

Fast forward to 8.30 yesterday evening, and I had a message from Kirk. It took me a minute or two to realise he was actually offering me the watch, another ten minutes to transfer the funds and less than an hour to meet him and take the package – complete with some rather nice Lindt chocolates – from his hands. In truth, the timing isn’t great as I only recently stretched myself a bit to land a lovely JLC that I’d been after for some time. However, these just never seem to get sold, and I reckoned it was now, or never. Now appealed a bit more 🙂

These are obviously a bit rushed, but I’ll follow up with some more over the weekend…