Alpina might not be a brand that regularly pops up on your watch radar. It doesn’t have a style signature per se; you couldn’t immediately identify it from across a boardroom table.
This Alpiner 4 Black Flyback Manufacture Chronograph, which will be launching at this year’s Baselworld, the annual fair that celebrates all things watches and jewellery, might just change all that.
First up, this muscular piece of engineering looks good. Its design is an update of a watch launched last year, but without any trace of the white that characterised its predecessor.
This watch is all black, bar, obviously, the indices and contrast stitching. It’s a move that has transformed a perfectly serviceable pilot’s watch into something more menacing. This isn’t Maverick with his cheeky grin and boyish charm; it’s pure Iceman – all pout and swagger.
And its mouth is writing checks its body can cash, for it contains the automatic flyback caliber AL-760, with Alpina’s patented ‘Direct Flyback Technology’.
This innovation was an important landmark in the brand’s history. Not only is it the first time in its 132-year history that is has developed an in-house chronograph caliber but it also managed to simplify the fly-back and return-to-zero mechanism.
The flyback on a chronograph means you can reset the function without first needing to stop the chronograph (on regular chronographs, you need to stop, reset and restart the timing hand). Breitling invented it back in 1932 for use in pilot’s watches to make it easier for them to use the timing function on a watch.
What Alpina has done with its new patented flyback is simplified the whole sequence so the push piece at 4 o’clock is the catalyst.
Once deployed the clutch is disengaged, then the chronograph is reset to zero by means of the single-piece hammer, whose sloping surfaces turn the two zero reset hearts so that the hands position themselves vertically again; and finally, the clutch engages once more as soon as the push-piece is released.
It’s a highly complex sequence, which, as with all chronographs, will probably only be used to help you boil an egg or maybe to time contractions should you be wearing it when your other half goes into labour. However you decide to deploy this particular piece of kit, rest assured it will certainly be identifiable across a boardroom table.
For more information, visit Alpina here.
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