The new Col & McArthur puts a real bit o' musket ball in every watch

Col & McArthur have been around for a little over a decade now. They specialize in themed collections of watches such as “Battlefront,” “Visionaries,” “Interstellar,” and “Legends.” They often include physical representations of each theme in their pieces. Their Lunar Watch 1969 from the Interstellar collection includes a lunar meteorite fragment. Their Halliday 2017 timepiece from the Legends collection includes an “authentic fragment” of French rocker Johnny Hallyday’s jacket.

You get the idea.

They’ve now focused on the United States’ 250^th anniversary with their “Patriot 1776” offering. The hook with this new piece is the incorporation of an “authenticated 18^th-century musket ball recovered from a Revolutionary War battlefield” into each watch.

The musket ball, recovered from Fort Ticonderoga, is used as the material for the subdial. Bordering the musket subdial is the inscription, “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof.” Taken from Leviticus 25:10, these words are etched on the Liberty Bell in the City of Brotherly Love. Solidifying the theme is the seconds hand itself: shaped as the Liberty Bell.

Other design elements include engraved abbreviations on the dial for twelve of the thirteen original colonies as hour markers. Directly above those abbreviations, engraved on the case bezel, is the founding year for each corresponding colony. And since 12 hour markers only allow for 12/13 colonies, Pennsylvania is addressed on the caseback. The semi-exhibition caseback is handsomely done, incorporating a partial view of the movement (visible through a star cutout), along with names of some of the Declaration’s signatories and a portion of the Declaration’s text. It sounds busy, but its handled well. Other design features include 50 stars representing 50 states circling the inner track of the dial.

The watch is offered with two different movements. $899 buys you a steel case with a Swiss Ronda quartz movement. $2,499 gets you a Sellita SW360-1 automatic movement in a titanium case. There are additional pricing options depending on whether you prefer a leather strap or metal bracelet. The titanium-cased automatic movement comes in a limited run of 500 pieces. Each steel-cased quartz version is described as individually numbered.

Both versions of the watch have sapphire crystal and measure in at 43mm with a 20mm lug width. As this reads as more of a dress watch, I wish they could have made it 39mm.

One key design difference between the two models is that the quartz edition is no-date, while the automatic has a date window at 3 o’clock. This presents a dilemma as I believe the symmetry on this piece works better without the date, but I’d also prefer the Sellita movement. For anyone interested in picking one up, you’ll have a list of pros and cons to consider.