Sunday, July 17, 2005

IWC 80110 Controversy? Nope

Sound familiar? Yep, we've been here before. Remember the whole (still slightly unresolved) controversy about the New JLC Cal 75x chronograph movement looking exactly like the F Piguet 1185?

Well, the new IWC 80110 has been creating a similar situation and got discussed at length here. Luger showed some interesting pictures on his new blog and wrote an interesting piece collating the different views. Luger has pictures; the first time I'd seen them back to back.


Pictures from Luger's blog

However, for me it's a very different story to the case of the JLC Cal 75x, because they were upfront about it from the start:
"Für die Umsetzung dieser Zielvorgaben griffen die IWC Konstrukteure auf bewährte Bestandteile und Fertigungsverfahren zurück und entwickelten daraus ein neues, eigenständiges Werk.
(In order to achieve these aims IWC´s construction team went back to parts and manufacturing process which already were well-tried to work well and developed a new, stand-alone (independent) movement.)

Beim Räderwerk hat IWC auf die robuste, bekannte Konstruktion des Valjoux Kalibers 7765 zurückgegriffen. Dessen Bauart hat sich sehr bewährt und die Verwendung dieser Teile gewährleistet auch in Zukunft die Verfügbarkeit für den Service.
(For the gear train IWC relied on the well-known, robust construction of the Valjoux 7765 caliber. This design is well-tried and using those parts ensures availability of them in the future.)"
The mainplate is also remarkably similar. However it's still unclear whether ETA makes it to IWC's specs or if IWC manufactures it, but who cares, they've already come clean. So, controversy? No, not really.

1 comment:

luger said...

Actually, the photos were by "explorer2" on the timezone, I just borowed them.

http://forums.timezone.com/index.php?t=msg&goto=1297240&rid=8249#msg_1297240