Why titanium, why now
Most titanium watches are built to dive, climb, or survive. The Hampstead Blue is none of these things. A note on an unusual material choice for a dress watch, and what it cost us.
Why titanium, why now
Titanium is a sport-watch material. Anyone who has looked at the watch industry for more than an afternoon knows this. The Pelagos, the IWC Aquatimer, the Citizen Promaster, the Seiko Prospex in titanium — all serious watches for serious environments. There is a reason for this pattern: titanium is roughly half the density of stainless steel, harder to mark, corrosion-proof in seawater, and entirely hypoallergenic. These are qualities that matter when you are under fifty metres of water or three thousand metres up a mountain.
They are not qualities that matter when you are wearing a dress watch to dinner.
And yet the Hampstead Blue is Grade 5 titanium. So is the Hampstead Salmon, which is more unusual still — the Salmon is polished titanium, a finish almost no one applies to the material for reasons I will come to. The Silver Sector Hampstead, by contrast, is steel. The decision of which case goes with which dial was not arbitrary.
The short answer for why we chose titanium for the Blue is weight. A 38mm stainless steel case on a slim alligator strap sits on the wrist with a certain emphatic presence — it announces itself. A titanium case of the same dimensions does not. It sits lightly, and the strap does most of the work holding it in place. For a dress watch, worn under a cuff for hours at a time, the difference is not cosmetic. It is experiential. You forget you are wearing the watch until you check it.
The longer answer is how titanium ages. Steel polishes beautifully when new and develops hairline marks almost immediately in normal wear. Titanium holds a brushed finish well, and a well-brushed titanium case at three years old looks much the same as it did at three months. For a piece someone intends to wear for thirty years, this matters. Our clients buy Hampsteads expecting their grandson or granddaughter to inherit them.
The cost is finishing. Grade 5 titanium is roughly three times harder than 316L stainless in the relevant sense — it resists the polishing wheel. A skilled finisher can polish a steel case in roughly half the time a titanium case takes, and the titanium case requires a different grit progression and different compounds at each stage. On the Hampstead Blue we use a brushed top surface with polished bevels, which is already ambitious. On the Salmon we use a full polish, which is close to reckless.
I say “close to reckless” because the first three Salmon prototypes failed final inspection for micro-scratching on the polished flanks — scratches that would have passed on a steel case and that the finisher had not produced on any of her previous work. We revised the polishing sequence twice and eventually changed the final compound. The production Salmon cases pass now. They took eight weeks longer to get right than the schedule allowed.
The question I am asked most often is why we did not simply use steel for the Blue, given the cost penalty. I have no good answer except that we tried. The prototype in steel was a decent watch. On the wrist, it was a heavier watch than the dial and the strap wanted to be. The Blue dial has a softness to it — the fumé is meant to shift in low light — and a steel case gave it a weight the dial was not written for.
Titanium is a material choice that costs us time and money for a result most clients cannot name. They simply report that the watch feels right. That is an answer I will accept.
Harold Finch is the watchmaker at Ashworth & Finch. He works at the atelier in Southampton.