Halden · the Four · 300 pieces a year
One revolution, front to back and round again. Five things worth knowing come past as it turns.
Scroll to turn it Shown here face on
One revolution · five stops
01 / 05Crystal
You are looking through it right now. Grown from aluminum oxide in a furnace, then sliced with a diamond saw. It sits at 9 on the Mohs scale, so in an ordinary day the only things that can scratch it are diamond and the grit in beach sand.
Synthetic sapphire · Mohs 9 · boxed and domed · 2.4 mm
02 / 05Bezel
One hundred and twenty clicks, thirty seconds of elapsed time each, and it refuses to go backwards. That comes from diving. If the bezel gets knocked on a ladder, it can only ever tell you that more time has passed than really has. The error is always the safe one.
Unidirectional · 120 clicks · 30 sec per click · steel
03 / 05Case
Edge on you can see the whole story: the crown and the caseback both screw down against gaskets, which is the only reason it survives two hundred metres. Unscrewing the crown to set the time is the one moment the watch is open, and it is why you do that on dry land.
316L steel · screw down crown and back · 200 m · 11.2 mm
04 / 05Calibre H·4
This is the face that lives against your wrist, and everything that matters is behind it. A weight on a bearing turns your arm moving into tension in a flat steel ribbon the width of a shirt button. Beside it the balance wheel swings four times a second, eight beats, which is the whole reason the seconds hand sweeps instead of ticking.
4 Hz · 28,800 vibrations/hour · 27 jewels · 70 h reserve
05 / 05Dial & hands
Back where it started. The markers are filled with a strontium aluminate compound that takes light in and gives it back slowly. Nothing is burning and nothing runs out. Ten minutes under a lamp buys most of a night, dimming the whole way down.
Applied indices · BGW9 compound · sunray brass dial
Reference HLD‑04‑BGW
Made in a shop of one, three hundred times a year, and finished by hand where a machine would have been faster and worse. Everything below is measured, not rounded.
| Case | 316L stainless steel, 39.5 mm across, 11.2 mm deep, 46.8 mm lug to lug |
|---|---|
| Crystal | Synthetic sapphire, boxed and domed, antireflective coating on the inner face |
| Bezel | Unidirectional, 120 clicks, luminous pip at zero |
| Water resistance | 200 m, screw down crown and caseback |
| Movement | Calibre H·4, automatic, 27 jewels, 208 parts |
| Frequency | 28,800 vibrations per hour, 4 Hz |
| Power reserve | 70 hours |
| Accuracy | Minus 2 to plus 6 seconds a day, regulated in five positions |
| Luminous | BGW9 on the indices, the hands and the bezel pip |
| Strap | 20 mm, quick release, steel bracelet or vulcanized rubber |
| Production | 300 pieces a year, numbered on the caseback |
| Price | $3,900, including a five year service |
The shop
Halden is one watchmaker and one bench. The cases are cut by a shop that has been turning steel for four generations, the sapphire comes from a furnace in Switzerland, and everything after that happens here, slowly, under a loupe.
Three hundred a year is not a marketing number. It is what one pair of hands can do properly while also answering the phone. When the year is spoken for, the list opens again in January, and nobody is charged a deposit to sit on it.
If something goes wrong, it comes back here. Not to a service center, not to a country you have to ship it to. Here, to the same bench it was built on.
From Craft & Site
Halden is not a real watchmaker and this is not a live site. I built it to answer one question I get asked a lot, which is whether the thing you saw on some brand's site can actually be built for a small business, or whether it needs a team and a six figure budget.
The watch you turned is a generated render, and so is the bench further down. Neither is a photograph of anything. There is no Halden and no workshop, so nothing real is being stood in for. I would not do this on a real client's site: if a page shows you their product, it has to be their product.
The one image on this page, the bench a moment ago, is the opposite. It was generated, and it is there as atmosphere rather than as evidence. There is no Halden workshop to photograph, so nothing is being stood in for. I would not do that on a real client's site: if a page shows you their room, it has to be their room.
How it turns is the part I would want you to judge me on. It is forty eight frames tiled into one image, stepped by a CSS scroll timeline. There is no JavaScript on this page at all, no library, no scroll listener, nothing to go wrong on a slow phone. If your browser cannot do it, or if you have asked your computer for less motion, the watch simply sits there face on and every fact is laid out below it, which is the same information without the movement.
The specification, the prices and the shop are invented. The horology is not: the Mohs number, the reason a dive bezel only turns one way, the eight beats a second, and the reason the jewels are ruby are all true of real watches.
Carson Holder, Craft & Site