A. Lange & Sohne Lange 31 Watch In Rose Gold

by Ariel Adams (RSS feed)
Aug 27th 2009 at 12:01PM

From an technical standpoint the A. Lange & Sohne Lange 31 watch was a nightmare to engineer. Not because the concept is difficult, but because the precision is. You see the Lange 31 has a power reserve of 31 days (744 hours), split between two mainspring barrels. The challenge was to make sure that the power moving through the slowly unwinding springs to the rest of the movement was consistent, otherwise the watch would run either too fast or too slow most of the time. This is because a fully wound spring releases a totally different amount of torque than an almost totally unwound spring.

Lange includes a winding key to wind the movement as you can't do it by hand, but you only do it once a month. Of course the dial has a power reserve meter, small seconds, and Lange's famous "out-size date." The piece you see is lovely. All this design work came after the years spent trying to make the concept work. I spoke with a watch maker recently and told him about the Lange 31 watch. He said that he didn't understand how it could be done, but if anyone could do it, it was the people at Lange.

To retain consistent power moving to the watch, the L034.1 movement uses a superior constant force escapement that regulates the torque from the mainsprings as it moves to the watch. This sounds simple, but the level of tweaking Lange had to do to get it right was likely legendary. As is the case with the Teutonic brand, the engineering team spent literally years thoroughly testing the already complete movement to ensure reliability over a long period of time. A direct personification of the German work ethic, "do it right the first time, no matter how long it takes."

The original Lange 31 watch was made available in platinum, but now a new 45.9mm wide rose gold case (with matching hand and dial markers) will be available. The watch has a warm look to it and is matched to a brown crocodile strap. Everything about the German masterpiece watch is top quality with many hours of time dedicated to hand decoration and assembly of the movement. Tested to perfection, this represents a feat of luxury un-replicated anywhere else. Price will be over $300,000.

Ariel Adams publishes the luxury watch review site aBlogtoRead.com.

Gallery: A. Lange & Sohne Lange 31 watch