I recently fully serviced this Blancpain Flyback Chronograph with a modified F. Piguet 1185 movement. This watch is not for sale. When originally released in 1988, this was, and I believe still is, the world’s thinnest automatic chronograph movement. Blancpain led the renaissance of modern mechanical watchmaking. The movement features a vertical clutch design, refined finishing, a solid gold automatic rotor, and several clever innovative design elements. I’ve shown the movement in various stages of disassembly. The single integrated “straight-line” flat reset hammer, which resets all chronograph counters together, is innovative and space efficient. The hour/minute hands are not driven from the center of the watch but instead via the fourth train wheel, the pinion of which is exposed on the dial plate. The screws in this watch have all been highly miniaturized and therefore must be handled with great care and secured with the correct torque and no more. The hour counter design is an excellent design— leveraging a secondary train installed between the main and dial plates— and driven by a counter wheel incremented by the vertical clutch once per revolution. The chronograph resets with exceptional power and this power is not adjustable. Because of this, the seconds hand must be unusually rigid and tightly installed onto the vertical clutch. Once this hand is removed, it can rarely be reused because the necessary strength no longer exists once reinstalled. To address this, I was able to source an Omega hand, closely matched to the original, and shortened it. I actually prefer the Omega hand to the original. This movement shares a subset of parts with the Omega calibre 3303. The 3303 is loosely based on the 1185 with only a subset of parts interchangeable.
