The lede image is being generated by an AI bot as I type this. It’s taking a while. You’ll see the image before I do from the perspective of this blog post. How’d it turn out?

I’m working on a watch for a friend of mine. Super cool skeleton movement cyborg sort of watch. Depending on various things, look out for it in the gallery… It may take a while though, but there’s another much more exciting blog post to come with that. Anyway, as part of the discussion around designing the watch, the subject of black cases (and bracelets by extension) came up.

Black watches are a thing. Have been a thing. Will undoubtedly continue to be a thing. Not my thing, per se, but it’s pretty rare that the watches I make ARE my thing these days (which is a good thing). Thing.

It’s not that I object to the color or anything like that, it’s just that I don’t TRUST the color.

The black color on watches comes in a few ways: PVD or ceramic.

Ceramic is pretty expensive. In addition to whatever typically proprietary mix of metallic powders, you have to have expensive molds and more expensive kilns. It’s basically limited to the big name manufacturers with big budgets and big price tags. The cheapest that comes to mind is Rado under the Swatch umbrella, probably in the mid-four figure range. As a result, these cases tend to be pretty proprietary. Most ceramics are pretty impressive. Impervious to scratches with high mohs hardness ratings, feather light, unbreakable, and guaranteed to improve your sex life. Some can be brittle, and instead of being prone to scratching when you bash it on the corner of the granite countertop, will chip or crack. The aftermarket is getting on board with ceramics, but for now it seems to be limited to dive watch bezels, which are kind of a must for me for the same reason a sapphire crystal is a must. Ceramic cases are pretty much out of reach though for Rocinante Watches for the time being, and not a high priority any time soon.

The exception to the expensive ceramic mold (pun fully intended) appears to be the recent freshification of the word “ceramic”. The Moonswatch is “bioceramic”. Which, appropriate for a bald faced marketing exercise posing as a watch (hot take or is this the consensus yet?), is really just marketing wank for “plastic”. Kinda like other “luxury” good marketers and their “precious resins”. Keep your plastic. Please. If you really want a plastic watch case, I have a 3D printer, and we can dig into that, but I really don’t recommend it.

The other way to get a black watch is with PVD coatings. PVD stands for Physical Vapor Deposition. This is also an expensive enough process that I can’t do it here in my… what should I be calling this? Office? Shop? Atelier? Abattoir? It requires some expensive machinery. You have whatever you’re coating hung by a hook on one side, and a slug of whatever you’re coating it with on the other. Pump out all the air, heat things, electrically charge them, say the magic word three times, and bam! Black watch! It’s all very scienticious.

Here’s the thing though, the coating is really thin. Like, atoms thin. And under those atoms, is the same stainless steel alloys you otherwise normally find. Prone to the exact same nicks and scratches as any normal stainless steel alloy. Only, with regular stainless steel, the stainless steel inside looks just like the stainless steel outside. With the black PVD, it’s super high contrast, and stands out like a Timex in a Patek display. The smallest scratch is very apparent and hard to miss.

Not all PVD coatings are created equal though. Some coatings add hardness and scratch protection and such. Sometimes these are called “DLC”, which stands for Diamond-Like Carbon, or sometimes I see Diamond-Like Coating. These can make the surface very hard, much like a ceramic. It’s still pretty thin, and you still have the not-so-diamond-like stainless steel underneath. It can still be scratched, it just takes more effort. I HAVE seen these available. It’s very rare, and I’m only aware of ONE option currently available, it only fits NH- and 4R- series movements, and it isn’t cheap.

While the DLC may last longer than your run of the mill, color-only PVD coating, it too wants to maximize its entropy, and you WILL smash it on a building or rub it against a rock. It’s just a matter of time.

Post script, The lede image is done. That… is disappointing. Wow. The AI revolution may not yet be upon us…