Name: Christopher Ward Twelve X Steel Special Edition New
Brand: Christopher Ward
SKU: SKUzxVUYCgqSl
Availability: InStock

This Special Edition, stainless steel iteration of the watch we created to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of our own movement, Calibre SH21, features exquisite hand finishing and a redesigned dial ring and hand set. The Twelve X Steel Special Edition is as ambitious as it is beautiful and as it’s limited to just 250 pieces is not to be missed.

Power, precision and beauty

Reaction to the Twelve X has been astonishing, with journalists, bloggers and YouTubers all eulogising over it. But though the Ti’s a best seller, we kept hearing a single refrain: ‘What about steel?’ We listened, and here’s the spectacular result.

The Twelve X revolves around the most extreme open-heart surgery ever attempted on our in-house, five-day chronometer movement Calibre SH21. With every aspect visible through box sapphire crystals front and rear, there’s nowhere to hide, demanding the best of the best, top to bottom, back to front, inside and out.

With the Twelve X Ti, we achieved this through innovative levels of machine finishing, delivering a gleam almost indistinguishable from the best hand polishing. But for the Steel, we took a different path. It wasn’t enough to simply offer the same skeleton piece in a different material – it had to be exciting in ways purely its own. While machine finishing was the story of the Ti, the Steel’s is a tale of the finest hand polishing.

Doing things the old way comes with a built-in problem, however. This was never designed to be an easy watch to make – quite the reverse, in fact – but cutting edge efficiencies made it possible. How, though, could we reintroduce manual polishing while maintaining an acceptable price? After all, with as many as 150 facets to polish, it would take over six hours to hand finish each movement…

Indeed, as hand polishing costs around 300 CHF (Swiss Francs) per watch, it should add almost 1,000 CHF (or around £880) to the selling price. Still, we had to do it – it’s a limited run, after all. And, happily, we’d the experts on hand to make it possible. APJ Sàrl are specialists we’ve worked with since Bel Canto, and were champing at the bit to get at the Twelve X Steel.

The end results are incredible – but we could, in good conscience, only bring you them by breaking our own rules. So out goes our normal ‘three times the manufacturing cost’ model, allowing us to sell the rubber strap Twelve X Steel at same price as the Ti. And the bracelet version is actually less, as using a cheaper metal here outweighs the Steel’s extra finishing costs.

Titanium and steel have subtly different qualities, and each works amazingly well when the entire timepiece plays to their strengths, titanium pairing brilliantly with the most cutting edge production methods, while more traditional steel cleaves best to the old ways. The beautifully hand-finished Twelve X Steel is a very special edition of a very special watch.

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Calibre SH21, as you’ve never seen it before

Power comes, of course, from our own Calibre SH21, a COSC certified movement with a remarkable 120 hour power reserve through twin barrels. Built of around 198 parts, it’s never looked better than in the Twelve X Steel, with such critical components as the train bridge, automatic bridge, hour bridge, and balance bridge hand polished to perfection.

Despite its beauty, SH21 is as robust as they come. Every movement at Christopher Ward is durable and reliable – hey, we wouldn’t use them otherwise – but SH21 is especially so. (Over the past decade its seen fewer returns than any other movement. Credit designer Johannes Jahnke: his brief, to make it as strong, dependable and easy to service as possible, was delivered in spades.)

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The bold and the beautiful

Twelve X’s many-layered, multi-angled bridgework has never looked better than on the Steel, where they’re all hand-polished by our partners at specialists APJ Sàrl. They’ve hired and trained new staff, and fine-tuned their production flow, to make first the Bel Canto, and now the Twelve X Steel, possible.

Rear window

There are over 150 polished facets on the Twelve X Steel, and the reverse of the watch shows off many of them: if there’s one thing we’d never do, it’s make the face immaculate while leaving the back sandblasted and plain. Sure, that’s a good way to save money – but the Twelve X is about cutting as few corners as possible, so cost be hanged. (And where we do save, it’s always on elements the owner will never see or feel.)

Bridges of size

Open worked watches look amazing, but at the same time can appear busy and difficult to read. That’s why we put so much time and effort into splitting time-telling away from the movement here, with bold hands, clear hour and minute marks around the rim and big, blocky, brutalist bridge work. It results in a design that’s cohesive and strong, not built of lots of confusing little bridges.

Blue crush

For the Steel, we’ve made a number of design tweaks here and there. Consider the new electric blue handset and luminous dial ring, which really ping. Or the new lume, no longer white but now a subtle shade of pale blue. It all makes the watch clearer to read than ever. (The other difference, of course, is one you’ll feel rather than see: the weight is inevitably up when compared to the Ti, at 65g for the head alone.)

Low profile

In most regards, this is exactly the same watch as the Twelve X Ti, with the same 41mm case, and the same box sapphires top and bottom to reveal the skeleton movement, as well as make the mid-case appear super-slim. (This said, the height is actually very low, especially for a Calibre SH21 automatic – just 12.3mm.)