Review: IWC Big Pilot’s Watch Shock Absorber XPL

My favourite question in the world is, “What if?”. From the most inane speculation—"What if you think in your accent?”—to the greatest endeavour—"What if we went to Mars?”—“What if?” is the leading cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. Unencumbered, “What if?” just might be the most potent question in human history. Here’s IWC having a go.

The Pilot’s Watch

From the first shaky twelve seconds completed by the Wright brothers in 1903, powered flight has been a non-stop avenue of problems. From breaking the sound barrier to breaking our very planet’s gravity, keeping people aloft has been an endeavour scouted by only the bravest and most desperate. Noise, vibration, stability, speed, drag, turbulence, g-force—flight is a constant war with physics that makes David and Goliath look like a fair fight.

Originally something of a pastime for bored, wealthy adrenaline junkies, the advent of global war soon saw the express need to dominate the air, and with it came rapid advancement in aviation technology. That the period between the first flight and the first powered flight was 120 years, and the first powered flight and the first manned space flight just 58 years demonstrates the urgency of necessity brought about by an increasingly restless world.

For IWC, it all began when family friend Ernst Jakob Homberger grabbed himself one of the first British private pilot’s licenses. He needed a watch, a special watch for pilots, and IWC obliged. And so, in 1936, alongside the maiden flight of the Supermarine Spitfire, IWC created a watch with shatterproof glass, a rotating timing bezel, antimagnetic escapement, luminous markers and an 80-degree Celsius window of operation.

Since then, aeroplanes have become capable of flying higher, further and faster, ever reducing the margin between human capability and the indiscriminate squeeze of physics. And so, with the highest g-force ever survived by a human somewhere between two and three hundred g, IWC got to wondering—what if they could make a watch that could survive a hundred times that?

The Problem Of G Force

This highlights the importance of the “What if?” question. It’s not to reason why, but to take a journey and make discoveries along the way. In the case of the IWC Big Pilot’s Watch Shock Absorber XPL, the challenge of protecting it from 30,000g was reason enough for its existence.

The “XPL” in the watch’s name comes from the establishment of IWC’s experimental engineering division, for whom the shock absorber was their first project. It was noted that a decent whack of a watch against an unforgiving metal cockpit could generate a shock of up to 1,000g, and so came the ponderation of the ultimate shock-resistant watch.

The problem arises from the way an impact works. The greater the deceleration of an object, the higher the g-force and the more damage caused. Two very rigid bodies striking one another offer no shock protection, transferring the energy from the static object to the moving one in an instant. In order to reduce the immediacy of that impact, more time is needed for the deceleration, to slow it down. This is why we have crumple zones in our cars and flexible barriers on race circuits.

A mechanical watch is a very rigid object. From the placement of the crown to the mounting of the movement itself, it offers little to no cushioning from impact. At most there are small, deformable devices found on the movement’s most vulnerable parts, like the flexible brass springs encapsulating the balance end stones. To build a watch that could survive a 30,000g impact, however, it would need to go from being rigid to very flexible indeed.

The Shock Absorber XPL

So, here’s what IWC did: instead of mounting the movement straight to the case, it created a flexible spacer to hold it in place in free air. That sounds straightforward in theory, but in practice, the situation becomes a lot more complicated. The assumption is that the impact needs only to be protected in one direction, like the shock absorber in a car. A bump on the road only ever goes up and down, and so that’s all the absorption it needs to cater for.

Think about a watch on a wrist and it soon becomes obvious that a good, hard whack could come from any direction. Calculating this is beyond even the smartest human mind, and so it was to advanced computer simulation and the Fracture and Shock Physics Group at Cambridge university that the design was entrusted.

Shapes, structure and material were run through simulations to create a concept that offered protection from an impact at 30,000g. The resulting cantilevered arrangement looks almost organic, thicker where more load is taken in isolation and thinning out where the load is spread between springs. The precision required to provide uniform resistance in every possible direction against such high loads makes my brain hurt.

The material chosen to make this spring needed to be flexible—but not too flexible—with high levels of tensile strength—that is, excellent resistance to deformation without breaking. Too much flexibility and the movement would simply slap around inside and decelerate against the rigid case instead. Not enough tensile strength and the spring would transition from elastic to plastic and crack.

Bulk metallic glass was the answer. This is where molten metal is cooled rapidly, preventing a typically inflexible crystalline structure from forming, creating a more random, amorphous arrangement closer to that found in glass. This has the advantage of being less brittle and more resistant to repeated applications of stress.

Between the design and the material, IWC had created a shock absorber capable of dynamically protecting the movement from any g-force up to 30,000g. The gap between the movement and the case speaks volumes for the levels of deformation and control we’re talking about here, needing to flex enough at, say half the maximum load to absorb it safely, but not too much at full load and bottoming out. The problems, however, weren’t over yet.

Decoupling The Crown

In order to further improve the performance of the watch’s shock resistance, IWC also modified the calibre 32115 to replace the heavy plates with lightweight aluminium. This reduces the inertia of the impact—basically, there’s less heft to decelerate.

The theory was sound, but there was a problem. No matter how lightweight the movement, no matter how effective the spring, there was still one point of connectivity between the watch and its engine that needed to remain rigid: the crown.

Locked in place on the outside and coupled to the movement on the inside, a traditional crown and stem acts as an anchor between the inside and outside, which, as far as shock absorption goes, is exactly the opposite of helpful. And so IWC developed a unique, flexible coupling between the crown and movement that allows it, with the use of a bayonet clutch, to detach when locked in place.

Think of it like a bayonet light bulb—when twisted into its locking point, the crown is held down in a decoupled state; when unlocked, the crown is sprung out and the clutch reengages so the movement can be wound and set—all whilst still retaining 100m of water-resistance in the locked position, I might add. And speaking of winding, despite all the forces at work, this watch still gets a whopping 120 hours of power from an automatically winding mainspring.

That’s Not All

But the “What if?” thinking doesn’t end there. Not only does the Shock Absorber XPL have all that wizardry going on inside, but IWC has also given consideration to keeping the watch looking tidy in an impact as well.

The 44mm case is made in familiar Ceratanium, IWC’s proprietary case material that delivers the best of everything with all the flaws ironed out. Typically with a lightweight titanium case, the metal suffers from lack of scratch resistance, and with ceramic, that superlative scratch resistance is contrasted by brittleness—neither of which are ideal in an aircraft cockpit where a watch is guaranteed to get knocked about.

So Ceratanium takes a lightweight titanium case and uses a sintering process to fuse a ceramic layer to the outside, avoiding the problem traditional PVD coating has where it can chip and flake. Thus, the titanium becomes scratch resistant and the ceramic crack resistant. But if you really want make sure your new luxury watch remains in good nick during your next sortie, IWC even provides a little 3D-printed, removable protector for the case as well. Think of it like a little expendable suit of armour for your watch.

Put all this together and you have a watch that, when tested for real by the Fracture and Shock Physics Group, doesn’t just meet its goal of 30,000g but actually exceeds it. The footage is quite incredible to watch and really highlights the magnitude of the forces at work here. Look carefully you’ll see what looks like boiling air being forced from the case in jets as it’s compressed in a fraction of a second.

It’s answers to the question “What if?” like this that make my bed worth getting out of in the morning. We may question the purpose of the watch and the point of the experiment, but I think that misses an innate part of human curiosity that is so important to who we are as a species. Without questions like this being asked, we wouldn’t have things like amorphous metals and ceramic-fused titanium at all. It’s that very question that will ultimately be the saviour—or destroyer—of everything we know.

Given that this experimental watch costs over $80,000 and will only be made in batches of ten per year, your best chance to try one on is in augmented reality on IWC’s app—which is actually pretty neat. Why not give it a try and see if being an experimental test pilot is a good look on you.

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