Review: Ophion 786 Velos

Right, hear me out because I know if you’ve got your eye on a watch like the Tudor Black Bay 58, you’re not going to ditch that to buy something completely different. Or will you? Maybe once you’ve seen the Ophion 786 Velos, you just might change your mind…

A massive thanks goes to the guys at The Limited Edition who allowed us to film this and a whole host of other incredible timepieces.

Background

In the last few years, more and more people have decided that enough’s enough and that instead of dancing around for their local watch dealer, they’re going to go off-piste and buy something weird. Industry mizog François-Paul Journe has been instrumental in turning collectors’ attention to the esoteric. It’s a brave new world, with people parting with hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a watch from a brand whose founder isn’t even in the ground yet.

The reason that’s surprising is because the industry puts so much weight on heritage. Heritage is cool and all, being a business to have the done the first this or that or the other, but ultimately if you’ve got to pay through the small intestine for it, its appeal can only go so far with so many people.

Enter a flood of interesting watchmakers like H. Moser, Czapek, Grönefeld who’ve all made watchmaking fun again—that is, if your wallet is tall enough to go on the ride. These brands offer better value than their aging compatriots, but cheap they ain’t. So for the rest of us we just have to revel in the second hand joy of the Instagram collectors filling their watch boxes with the weird and wonderful.

Except that’s a complete lie. You don’t need to pay BMW money for a unique, interesting watch. In fact, if you’ve got the cash for a Black Bay 58, you too could have a watch that will make you the belle of the ball at any watch meet. Enter Miguel Morales and the Ophion 786 Velos.

Miguel is Spanish. Not the first place you’d think of when it comes to watchmaking, but hey, the Spanish can like watches too. Miguel is like you and me. He enjoys high-end, independent watches, but doesn’t exactly have the means to pay for them.

So, he wondered if he could make his own, and make it much cheaper. Now, I know you’d like to say your fancy new watch is entirely made by hand, and so would Miguel, but it quickly became apparent to him that if he wanted to achieve his goal, he’d have to seek assistance of a more artificial nature.

He did his research, and found some interesting results. Basically, machines play a much bigger part in watchmaking than you’d think. Handmade watches really are hand finished, and more often than not just the last, finishing touches. In fact, there are many, many expensive watches out there that barely see a pair of human hands at all.

Anyway, Miguel found suppliers in Switzerland, Germany and even his home country of Spain who could build him a high-end watch almost entirely by machine. Modern machining processes are just so good that the quality straight out them can rival that of some pretty expensive hand finishing—and there was an added bonus, too. Miguel could design whatever watch he liked.

Everything about the 786 Velos should be very expensive. The unique movement, the incredibly detailed dial, the sculpted case. But it’s not. It’s around $3,500, the price of a Tudor Black Bay 58, all thanks to the processes that many, many manufacturers use anyway. Only difference is that Miguel discloses it. Let’s take a closer look.

Review

I’ll just come out and say it. This looks like an expensive watch. Like, a really expensive watch. No mental effort has been spared in choosing a design that lends itself to the upper echelons of esoteric watchmaking. It looks like it came of the fascia of a piece of Swiss hi-fi that costs a bazillion dollars.

I’ll be honest, I was a little bit sceptical at first, but I’d mostly seen the terrible renders on the Ophion website before. The real thing, however, is much less Toy Story 1 and much more fancy pants watchmaking. I’ll take you through it.

Let’s start with the case, with those molten, teardrop lugs. Looks like it came straight out of legend Kari Voutilainen’s workshop, and it kinda did, because it’s made by Kari’s case company. Result, a watch that costs less than a Tudor that’s actually had something to do with the man himself—at least, via an external subsidiary that he’s got a vested ownership interest in, but that at least gives you some pretty decent pub fact material right there.

Onto the dial, and those with good eyesight will have already spotted that it’s guilloched and set with applied markers and tracks. It looks absolutely unbelievable. That’s modern machines for you. Only the most experienced machinists with high magnification will spot the markings here and there that give it away—and those same experts will probably be a little disappointed if they looked too closely at some other big name watchmakers, too.

The hands and markers are chemically blued, again saving precious money, but the whole thing together looks anything but cheap. There’s just so much crisp detail for your eyes to gobble up that any thought of the what rather than the who instantly vanishes.

Usually with this kind of thing, the party trick ends when you turn it over and the back presents a familiar sight of an ETA or Sellita, which is fine, but for Miguel that just wasn’t going to do. So he had this movement made, again by machine, including the finishing, that offers a five day power reserve in hand wound form in the image of the same pocket watch movements that inspired Mr Journe.

Never mind all the little details, it’s just nice for once to be looking at something unfamiliar, and that’s a rare thing at this price point. The twin barrel layout and opened plates look and feel very exotic, even if the finish doesn’t quite hold together with intense scrutiny. But it doesn’t need to, because it costs less than a Tudor.

Here’s the thing: a watch like this marks a fork in the road for us buyers. In one direction is the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the loss of our precious industry to the machines. On the other is the realisation that that happened a long time ago, and that with wider acceptance of that fact comes watches that are significantly cheaper with a whole lot of punch packed in.

The Ophion 786 Velos is just a teaser of what’s possible when you embrace a different approach to watchmaking. It’ll never replace the very high-end hand-finished stuff because that has its own appeal, but it does mean that the rest of us no longer have to resign ourselves to drooling over pictures of stuff we can’t afford. It really is an incredible time to be a watch fan.

What do you think of Ophion and the 786 Velos? Do you like the idea of owning a watch that so proudly boasts its machine-made creation? Or is that too much like seeing how the sausage is made?