I’ve finally come up with a Kickstarter idea that seems workable, and I can 100% get behind. I’m going to build myself a watch! Well, by “myself” I mean along with my good friend Cameron Lauder. And by “build” I mean design. Kinda.

See, I thought it would be much harder to put together a watch, but after some time in the dojo, practicing my google-fu, it seems that there is a lot less that goes on under the case in a watch than one may think. It turns out that thanks to the ”quartz crisis” (cleric?) the Swiss watch industry got extremely consolidated. And this means that there certain types of swiss watch movements are effectively commoditized.

Which is all to say that I’ve picked out a movement. Possibly. The Valjoux 7750 is an automatic chronograph movement that seems to be extremely popular which means that customization is going to be easy. It also had it’s patent expire in the early 90s, and has a mature (read: quality) ecosystem of Asian copies, which means that it can be cheap. All I need to do is bring Cam around to being on board with a chronograph, and that’s settled.

I also found some initial suppliers for cases, movements, and hands. At this point, I could just put together a one-off watch of my choosing, but I think I might like to see if I can garner enough interest to do a kickstarter. That, and Cam also wants a custom watch, and this could be fun.

That, and we’ve agreed on Futura as a font for the watch face. Which will look stunning.