After launching the fittingly militaristic Milgraph last year (and more recently giving it a shiny new rebel pilot colourway with Black Badger) we’ve been holding our collective breath waiting to see what Micromilspec would do next. After all, having designed so many squadron-specific watches over the years, they have plenty to draw from. Well, rather than riffing on their field watch style, they’ve instead opted for their first ever pilots’ watch in The Dualtimer.
Pilot is a shiny new category for Micromilspec, but it’s something they have enviable experience in. In fact, of their over 40 custom military watches, the very first was designed for the Royal Norwegian Air Force, on which the new Dualtimer is based.
The new watch is very much in the same vein as the Milgraph. It has the same intense, multi-layered 42mm case shape, complete with crown protector and rotating bezel and the same chunky, easy-to-operate crown – but with some notable differences. For one, that crown is now on the right-hand side rather than the left. For another, the case is now made from steel rather than titanium.
The changes make a lot of sense in the context of a pilots watch. You don’t need it to be lightweight when you’re sat in a cockpit and you’re not going to knock the crown when you’re flying above rather than scrambling across the landscape. Possibly the bigger change however is that there’s no chronograph function.
We’ve seen pilots’ chronographs before (IWC’s Top Gun comes to mind), but by stripping it out the Dualtimer can opt for a much, much cleaner look. Hell, with the high-contrast white-on-black look and iron sights at 12, this has a lot in common with classic military pilots’ watches, even if the case is anything but.
What it does have however is a central GMT hand and a panoramic date window at 3 o’clock. While I like the idea of a really barebones twist on Micromilspec’s aesthetic blueprint, it needs something balancing the admittedly cool branding at 9 o’clock. That GMT hand is read via the grippy, rotating bezel which again uses high contrast white-on-black typography, making this feel like what would happen if the Ministry of Defence commissioned a traveller’s watch.
It’s not just readable during the day though. The white’s not just white; it’s lume. So, when you turn off the lights on whatever stealth mission you find yourself on, the local time glows green while the GMT hand and bezel glow blue, a genuinely useful bit of colour coding.
Inside is the Sellita SW330-2 GMT movement with a weekend-proof 56-hour power reserve and a 4hz frequency. It’s a seriously capable third-party calibre that has the added benefit of making what is a distinctively designed, serious contender in pilots watches pretty damn affordable – £1,440 to be precise. Given the level of machining here, the specs and the attention to detail, I see the Dualtimer being even more popular than the Milgraph.
All this just leaves one question. Now that they have land and air, where’s sea?
Price and Specs:
More details at Micromilspec.
Nice watch. I like the case and bracelet.