1941 Remontoire

The Gronefeld brothers are not from La Chaux-de-Fonds. They are not from Geneva. They are not from Glashutte. They are from Oldenzaal, a small town in the eastern Netherlands near the German border. Their grandfather Johan was a watchmaker. Their father Sjef was a watchmaker. Both maintained the mechanism of the Saint Plechelmus church clock in Oldenzaal, a clock that featured a 30-second remontoire, a constant-force mechanism that has been regulating timekeeping in church towers for centuries. Bart and Tim Gronefeld grew up watching their father and grandfather service that mechanism. The 1941 Remontoire is the wristwatch version of what they learned at home. The name 1941 refers to the year their father was born.

A remontoire is one of the most elegant solutions in all of mechanical engineering. The problem it solves is fundamental to every mechanical watch ever made. A mainspring delivers power unevenly. When fully wound, it pushes harder. As it unwinds, the force drops. This means the escapement receives inconsistent energy across the power reserve, which affects the rate. A fresh wind runs slightly faster. A depleted spring runs slightly slower. Every mechanical watch has this problem. Most compensate for it through clever escapement design and regulation. A remontoire eliminates it. Instead of powering the escapement directly from the mainspring, the mainspring powers a small intermediate spring that sits between the gear train and the escapement. This intermediate spring is recharged at fixed intervals, in this case every eight seconds, delivering a consistent pulse of energy regardless of how much power remains in the mainspring. The result is constant force at the point where it matters most. The watch runs at the same rate whether the mainspring was wound ten seconds ago or thirty hours ago.

I need to explain why this is so difficult to execute in a wristwatch. Constant-force mechanisms have existed in tower clocks for centuries. The Saint Plechelmus clock proves that. But a tower clock has room. A wristwatch does not. The Caliber G-05 fits this entire mechanism, 258 parts including 36 jewels partially set in solid gold chatons, into a movement that is 32mm in diameter and 5.5mm thick. The case is 39.5mm and 10.5mm thick. That is a dress watch profile for a complication that most brands would not attempt at any size. The remontoire uses hypocycloidal gears, twin ball bearings, jewelled levers, and pinions to rewind the intermediate spring every eight seconds. A governor speed regulator visible through the dial at 9 o'clock prevents the rewind from creating shock. Without the governor, each rewind would deliver a sharp jolt to the gear train. The governor absorbs that energy and releases it gradually. Watching it work through the dial is one of the most mesmerizing things I have seen in any watch. Every eight seconds, the small seconds hand at 6 o'clock pauses for a fraction of a moment, the governor spins, the intermediate spring recharges, and the seconds hand resumes. It is a visible heartbeat.

The case is 5N red gold, 18 karats, and the dial is solid sterling silver with a copper-salmon finish. The combination is extraordinary. Red gold is warmer than yellow gold and richer than rose gold. The salmon dial sits somewhere between pink and copper depending on the light. In direct sun, it leans copper. In shade, it goes pink. Against the red gold case, the two warm tones create a monochromatic harmony that is unlike anything in the Swiss catalog. The hands are flame-blued steel with mirror-polished centers, the lancette style that has been a Gronefeld signature. The contrast of cold blue steel against the warm salmon and red gold is a deliberate tension. It keeps the dial from becoming too warm, too soft. The blue hands are the anchor. They give the design structure.

The movement finishing is where the Gronefeld brothers separate themselves from brands ten times their size. The bridges are stainless steel, which is unusual. Most haute horlogerie movements use German silver or brass. Stainless steel is significantly harder to finish by hand. The bevels are hand-polished to a mirror edge. The centers are micro-blasted with circular grain. The main plate is spotted and ruthenium electroplated brass. The jewels sit in solid gold chatons, a traditional technique where each jewel is pressed into a gold cup and then friction-fitted into the plate. Gold chatons serve no functional purpose that a modern press-fitted jewel cannot match. They exist because they are beautiful and because they represent a standard of craft that the brothers refuse to abandon. Looking through the sapphire caseback at the Caliber G-05 is looking at work that could have been produced in the Vallee de Joux by a team of twenty. It was produced in Oldenzaal by two brothers and a small team.

The 1941 Remontoire won the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Geneve Men's Watch Prize in 2016. The GPHG is the closest thing watchmaking has to the Oscars. The Men's Watch Prize is not a niche category. It is the main event. A Dutch independent with no Swiss heritage, no Geneva seal, no centuries of brand mythology, walked into the ceremony and won it against established Swiss houses. The Gronefeld brothers had already won the GPHG Best Tourbillon award in 2014 for their Parallax Tourbillon. Two GPHG wins from a workshop in the Netherlands. That is not a fluke. That is a pattern.

Andreas Strehler of Sirnach, Switzerland, collaborated on the movement development. Strehler is himself one of the most respected independent watchmakers in the world, known for his work on constant-force mechanisms and astronomical complications. The partnership makes sense. The bridges were manufactured in Strehler's workshop. The finishing, assembly, and regulation were completed entirely in-house at Gronefeld in Oldenzaal. This is not a Swiss movement with a Dutch name on the dial. The intellectual property, the design, and the final execution are Dutch.

The power reserve is 36 hours with constant force and a stop mechanism. When the mainspring can no longer provide enough energy to rewind the intermediate spring, the watch stops rather than running inaccurately. This is a philosophical decision. Most watches will continue running as the mainspring depletes, losing accuracy gradually until they stop. The Gronefeld stops cleanly. It would rather show no time than show the wrong time. That tells you everything about how the brothers think.

The balance wheel is a variable-inertia design with four white gold timing screws, 10mm in diameter, free-sprung with a Phillips terminal curve and triangle hairspring stud. The frequency is 21,600 vibrations per hour, 3 Hz, which is lower than the 4 Hz found in most modern sport watches. The lower frequency is deliberate. A slower oscillation consumes less energy, which extends the effective constant-force window and reduces wear on the remontoire mechanism over decades of use. The entire system is designed around the remontoire. Every specification serves the constant-force goal.

The honest critique is the power reserve. 36 hours is short. Take the watch off at midnight and it stops before the next evening. This is the tradeoff of the remontoire mechanism. The intermediate spring consumes energy every eight seconds. That constant recharging cycle draws more from the mainspring than a conventional gear train. The stop mechanism compounds it by cutting power before the mainspring is fully depleted. The result is a watch that requires daily winding. For some people, that is a burden. For the kind of person who buys a Gronefeld, it is a ritual.

The watch community loves to talk about independent watchmakers. F.P. Journe. Philippe Dufour. Kari Voutilainen. MB&F. De Bethune. All of them Swiss or based in Switzerland. The Gronefeld brothers are conspicuously absent from most of those conversations despite having two GPHG wins, a constant-force mechanism that rivals anything from the Vallee de Joux, and movement finishing that holds up against any Swiss independent at any price. Part of it is geography. The Netherlands is not Switzerland. The watch world has a deep bias toward Swiss-made, and a workshop in Oldenzaal does not trigger the same associations as one in Geneva or Le Locle. Part of it is volume. Gronefeld produces extremely few watches per year. They do not have the commercial presence of Journe or the social media visibility of MB&F. They are quiet. They build. And when the GPHG jury evaluates the work on its merits, without the brand mythology and the geographic bias, the Gronefeld brothers win.

That is the story of the 1941 Remontoire. Two Dutch brothers, raised on their father's church clock, built a wristwatch that does what the church clock did: deliver constant force. They did it in 39.5mm and 10.5mm. They did it in red gold with a salmon dial. They did it with 258 hand-finished parts. And they did it from a town that nobody in watchmaking had heard of before they started winning prizes. The Swiss do not own precision. They never did. They just had a head start.