Ulysse Nardin has combined its love of marine life with unique complications in two one-of-a-kind Freak Vision timepieces. The Freak Vision Coral Bay timepieces exhibit an exciting new decorative bonding technique and the meticulous micropainting for which Ulysse Nardin has long been Haute Horlogerie’s acknowledged master.
To create the first of the Coral Bay pieces, Ulysse Nardin’s watchmakers turned to an electronic technique called bonding, in which thousands of 24k gold threads are employed to create a meticulous decorative motif. A bonding machine squeezes gold thread on each side, one thread after another, to draw a coral reef motif on the watch movement’s barrel spring bridge. Each thread is a different size, and all are tied only at the top and bottom of the thread, but not in its center.
The second Coral Bay edition, with its even more eye-catching red-and-blue face, showcases a miniature painting technique. Red and white acrylic paints are applied to the CVD-treated blue surface of the barrel bridge. Ulysse Nardin then heats the dial to 90 degrees between each color application and hand paints the remaining finer details with fine brushes under a magnifying glass. All told, the process takes about 20 hours for a single watch.
Both retaining the same 45mm case diameter and UN-250 caliber found in the previous Freak Vision.