MB&F Horological Machine N° 5 "On The Road Again" - Boys, This One's For You...

Just when we thought that Maximilian Büsser was veering away from the modernistic and plunging headfirst into the docile realms of traditional horology, with his high-domed beauty, the Legacy Machine N°1 .... this grabs us by the scruff of the neck and screams  "Look at me....."  This is the MB&F Horological Machine N°5 "On The Road Again".

It's hard not to get excited about a new MB&F timepiece, harder still to resist the urge to delve deeper into the story of it's creation, for each piece has a story, an origin, a reference point.  The MB&F HM5 has, as it's source, musings of what a futuristic watch would look like while living in the seventies, and as such, it is definitive of that generation - it's quest for all things new fangled, it's boom of technology, a time when the impossible became reality.

A timepiece thematic of the seventies then?  the HM5 does not disappoint.  There are unexpected forms in it's case structure, a new panorama to be found in the curvy  lens through which digital hours and minutes are magnified, and sports car louvres - fiddletastic little light-giving flaps, two of which can be opened or shut using a small case side lever.

Jean-François Mojon and Vincent Boucard take the impossible sketches and convert them into horological reality.  What they have created takes the form of a quite beautiful egg-shaped calibre, with two mineral glass discs for the "bidirectional jumping hours and continuous moving minutes" thus time can be set forwards and backwards.

If you can think it, if you can sketch it, then Eric Giroud is a man gifted with the ability to turn it into a thing of beauty in the metal, and this majestic sculpted zirconium compendium of lines and forms is indeed a thing of beauty.  It is smooth, it is grooved, it is curved - slightly industrial, marginally elegant and completely compelling.

The piece has water-resistance, but of course, not in the traditional sense.  The calibre is safe from the elements in a water-tight case, but the outer case is not - all the better to add some souped up twin exhaust pipes to drain the excess moisture.  Boys -  this is Lotus Esprit, this is Bond, this is that Corgi missile-firing toy you played with when you were ten years old - this one's for you.

The MB&F HM5 will be limited to 66 pieces, more information from the MB&F website.

Not familiar with the whole MB&F thing?  Allow me to educate you watch by watch here.