By Meor Amri Meor Ayob
One of the latest output from Officine Penerai, the Lo Scienziato Luminor 1950 Tourbillon GMT Titanio, is art in mechanical form.
The watch is a skeletonized tourbillon GMT, a tribute to Galileo Galilei, the Tuscan scientist that revealed that the Earth rotates around the Sun, rather than the other way around. This will be Officine Penerai’s second tribute to Galileo.
Officine Panerai adopted a new manufacturing technique for this watch. Called the Direct Laser Sintering method, it is a 3-dimensional printing process that prints out 0.02 mm layers of titanium pieces that are then welded together to create the watch casing. This method allows very intricate design which would otherwise be impossible to replicate.
The two small sub-dials on the left and right of the watch is the seconds and day/night indicator. The tourbillion is located at the 10 o’clock position. All the 6 hands on the watch (including the power reserve indicator hand at the back of the watch) have blue painted borders.
The watch is rather large with a diameter of 47 mm. Since the base material is titanium, the watch is extremely light. However, the use of the new manufacturing technique allows efficient use of material and this makes the watch even lighter than an equivalent titanium watch using traditional manufacturing techniques.
The movement powering this watch is the manual-winding P.2005/T. An Officine Panerai’s in-house movement, it has enough spring power to keep 144 hours of motive reserve.
The front and back of the watch is protected with sapphire crystal. On the back you can see the power reserve indicator.
The matte finish and the intricate case design make this a very attractive watch indeed. I definitely recommend it to anyone. For more info, please visit panerai.com
MEOR AMRI MEOR AYOB – CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Meor Amri is a passionate watch collector from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Having bitten by the horology bug in 2010, he has written extensively about the watch scene and has assembled a large collection of watches (excessively!!!) on his own free time. His blogs on the same subject are: Eastern Watch & Western Watch Read his articles here
