Three-Hander.

02–03

The case

A line drawn in air.

A year after Guo Hao and I completed the Tilted Watch, I came across a photograph of a 1960s Vacheron Constantin Royal Chronometer. It was not the name that arrested me, but the case—an attenuated, architectural thing, so disciplined in profile that it looked less like metal than like a line drawn in air and then hardened.

I brought the image to Mr Guo. “We should make our own.”

He studied it for a long time before answering. “Under seven millimeters,” he said at last. “A case that thin has no forgiveness.”

I had already done the arithmetic. Thirty-three millimeters across, no more than forty-two and a half from lug to lug, and under seven millimeters in height—slender enough to disappear beneath a cuff, yet substantial enough to register on the wrist.

06–07

Dial, glass, and back

It doubles the dial.

I had been sketching unusual hands since the beginning—long, narrow forms that belonged to no existing watch—and I brought those drawings out again. For the dial we chose a deep blue, engine-turned with a square-within-square pattern, nested squares that shifted with the light like water arrested in steps.

For the crystal, Mr Guo was particular. He wanted a vintage pocket-watch glass, not the sterile clarity of modern sapphire, but something with a faint blue bloom to it. “Look through it,” he said. “The glass throws the blue back into your eyes. It doubles the dial.” I had thought the color alone would be enough. He understood that the crystal itself could become a lens for it.

At the back we used an officer case back: a hinged lid rather than a plain display window. Inside, we engraved 林氏创艺十周年纪念.

12–13

The first case

The metal confessed.

The first case arrived with a flaw I could not immediately name. The lugs caught the light at an odd angle, the surface bending as if trying to turn a corner that did not exist. I blamed the CAD, then the model. Then one afternoon I held a lug tip to the light and saw it plainly: the tip was square, where it should have been tapered—drawn inward like a wedge so the side plane could fall cleanly. The square had forced the metal into a false, twisted geometry.

By then I had already decided the case was wrong. Mr Guo had seen it too, and we had begun redrawing the lugs. But the watch was still whole, still on my wrist, and I kept telling myself there was time. Rebuilding it would mean admitting the first version had never been right.

Then, during a strap change, the case cracked. Not from violence, not from clumsiness, but from the very thinness we had demanded. The sound was small, almost apologetic—as though the metal had finally confessed what we already knew.

Mr Guo received the broken case without reproach. He turned it slowly in his hand and said, “Now we rebuild it the way it should have been from the outset.”