Full Disclosure:
I (Rob) am a co-owner of Arcanaut and work with the company as its head of brand development. The following is a presentation of our recently released Arcanaut Bonehead, which is one of two pieces that currently occupy our “Experimentals” collection. WatchGecko kindly consented to publish this look behind the scenes of the watch’s development to help spread the word about our continued research into new and unusual materials.
Arcanaut Arc II — Bonehead Limited Edition
There aren’t too many luxury watches whose origin story begins in a crowded pitch-black bathroom in the centre of Stockholm with three middle-aged men huddled around a single object cooing and cawing at the top of their lungs, much to the distress of those outside but within earshot of said bathroom.
Thus began the Bonehead’s journey to market.
Of course, by the time we (Anders Brandt, James Thompson, and me) had entered the bathroom together, the material that would go on to give the Bonehead both its name and its distinctive character had already been created by James, the Black Badger himself. What we were looking at was unlike anything we’d seen before. A solid disc of Swiss-made LumiCast was glowing through a 2mm thick disc of what looked like metal-infused resin.
In a manner of speaking, that’s exactly what it was. But, what wasn’t immediately apparent was how those flecks of metal that gave the would-be dial so much depth and dynamism were arranged so structurally. It wasn’t that the flecks were “even” or “ordered” in any way. Rather, they had an almost causal relationship, as if they were not flecks at all, but rather disparate parts of one whole, held together by an invisible force.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what they were. Only the force that bound these metal inclusions wasn’t invisible at all — it has simply been removed.
The Bonehead dials begin life as five separate ingredients. There is a nickel-plated brass baseplate, a disc of solid LumiCast (produced for us by Swiss lume specialists RC Tritec), a block of aerospace-grade aluminium foam (the stuff one would normally find inside the wings of an aeroplane, used to give them strength without adding too much weight), a phial of UV-resistant and ultra-clear resin, and a German Silver chapter ring machined here in Copenhagen by our partners Schwartz.
The resin is poured into the aluminium foam and cured in a vacuum chamber to ensure the complete absence of bubbles. The resin-infused foam block is the cut into slices, which are delivered to Schwartz in Copenhagen to mill into lipped discs essential to the construction of the dial.
And so those flecks of metal, seemingly separate, were once connected as part of a foam block. Only now that they’ve been sliced up and held in state by the resin do they appear disparate. To us, they looked like the cross-section of a bone when the latticework marrow is revealed. That’s why we named the watch the “Bonehead”. And because we view ourselves as boneheads too. Obviously...
The result is a stunning, multi-layered dial that stands out from the crowd. In fact, it is so special, that we plan on using this dial construction technique (with a few tweaks to improve the ease of alignment and reduce QC failures) further down the line. This is, we believe, the aesthetic for which Arcanaut will become best known in the short–medium term and we’re keen to experiment further with different nighttime emission colours, different daytime colours, new coatings for the currently blue PVD-coated hands, and, most excitingly, different, self-made matrices of metal foam (either aluminium or titanium, depending on how our moods take us).
In addition to the wild dial, the Bonehead features a case finishing style never before seen from Arcanaut. We call this “outlined” design our “skeleton framing” finish. The case surfaces have all been recessed (bar the outline) to give a very graphical, almost blueprint-esque appearance to the already identifiable case silhouette for which the brand is known.
The case remains 40.52mm in diameter and around 13mm thick. It is water resistant to 100 meters and houses the Swiss-made automatic Soprod M100 calibre, which beats at 28,800 vph, and has a power reserve of 42 hours.
The Arcanaut Arc II — Bonehead is limited to 33 pieces. Deliveries are expected to conclude by the end of 2024. The price is USD 4,750 excluding taxes and including international shipping. If you’re interested in this or similar models, it is still possible to sign-up for the waiting list to be notified of upcoming releases or available models from this run.
