Introducing The Naked Watchmaker X Frederique Constant Slimline Perpetual Calendar Manufacture

The industry’s greatest technical resource The Naked Watchmaker has collaborated with Frederique Constant on an openworked version of the brand’s Slimline Perpetual Calendar Manufacture. Launched in 2015, the Slimline Perpetual Calendar Manufacture remains the most affordable in-house perpetual calendar on the market. Its simple, industrially optimized construction along with its restrained, classical exterior made it the perfect canvas for The Naked Watchmaker to work its magic and do what it says on the tin, which is to reveal the module’s inner gearwork.

Founded in 2017, The Naked Watchmaker is a venture by English watchmaker Peter Speake and Daniela Marin after leaving the company that bore his name. The website documents his incredible movement teardowns in great detail, offering a rare insight into their inner workings and to which many of us owe an insurmountable debt. The especial nature of the educational platform, being founded and run by a talented watchmaker already makes this collaboration a highly unsual one. While it marks the first endeavour of its kind for the company, it will also be the only one on which both Peter and Daniela have worked together; Peter, who has been the platform’s technical expert, will be sitting out of future collaborations.

Limited to 99 pieces, the TNW x Frederique Constant Slimline Perpetual Calendar has been cleverly open-worked, retaining its original dimensions – 42mm by 11.3mm – while adding height and depth to the dial. The movement is the self-winding FC-775 movement, which is made up of a perpetual calendar module built on top the Frederique Constant caliber FC-100. The perpetual calendar module employs a traditional, textbook construction. It is governed by a grand lever that samples a 12-month cam with notches of varying depth corresponding to the length of the months in a year, with deepest being February. Because it only accounts for a single year, the 29th of February can’t be encoded in this cam, hence an additional arm of the grand lever contacts a leap-year cam fixed on a 48-month wheel. This cam makes a quarter revolution a year, with a high step accounting for 29th February, preventing the beak of the grand lever from reaching the full depth of the February notch.