Review: Atowak Tarantula

It’s been my dream to own an Urwerk. Incredible, visionary watchmaking, but unfortunately incredibly expensive, too. Dream dashed into pieces on the floor? Not quite, because Atowak have the answer. It’s not quite an Urwerk, but at this bargain price its close enough. Let’s take a better look.

Background

I’ve been following the progress of Atowak over the years, seeing how they’ve been drawn, like me, to the wild and wacky watchmaking of the legends Martin Frei and Felix Baumgartner, creators of Urwerk. The first watch they did, or at least the first of theirs I saw, was the Ettore, which sort of looked a bit like an Urwerk and kinda sorta functioned like one too. Kinda. It was definitely Urwerk Lite. Diet Urwerk. The constituent parts tasted not quite right.

The follow-up Cobra, however, was different. It didn’t just look Urwerk-y, it acted Urwerk-y too. Like, it did complicated Urwerk things that, now I’ve learnt a bit more about the mechanism, aren’t actually that complicated after all. It’s a testament to the engineering genius of Urwerk that this is the case. Much harder to manufacture a simple solution to a complex problem than a complex one. I’ll explain that in a little bit. Or at least I’ll try.

What Atowak did with the Cobra, though, was to house this clever mechanism in a bulky, semi-shrouded shell. The concept was cool, only showing the part of the mechanism relevant to the timekeeping—and that’s how Urwerk started too—but having tasted the real deal, it left us hungry for more. Side note, never write a script when you can smell Indian food cooking. It affects your thought process.

So here we are with Atowak’s third outing, the Tarantula. It costs $2,199, but early birds get $550 off, taking the price down to—and I checked this on a calculator because my mental arithmetic game is weak AF—$1,649. But affordable Urwerk or not, $1,649 is still a fair old chunk of change, so should you be splashing out on the Tarantula or recoiling in terror? Good question, and that’s one I’m hopefully here to answer.

First swathe of people to drop off will be those who don’t like big watches. This thing is no wrist hugger. In steel, PVD’d or otherwise, you’ll need to carve out a space on your arm roughly 49 by 42mm in size. At 13.5mm thick, it doesn’t hide the bulk particularly well either. Very short lugs help wrap the strap around comfortably, but a steep angle top and bottom simply can’t hide that this is a big, big watch.

Second gaggle who’ll be saying no thank you are the ones who’ll only buy Swiss made. The movement here, a tidy-looking and high quality Miyota calibre 9039 is Japanese, and everything else is from China. Designed, manufactured and assembled there. Closest this will get to Switzerland will be as it flies over on its way to a prospective owner. Or maybe hanging on a dartboard in the Urwerk offices.

Third group that’ll be leaving early is the finishing crowd. For $1,649, the quality of the watch probably isn’t up to what you’d be expecting for the price. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. The watch is well-made and robust, but spend the same on a simple three-hander from TAG Heuer and you’re going to see a marked difference in finesse. The Tarantula has sacrificed the last word in refinement for the complexity of a $200,000 watch instead. That trade off might not be worth it to you.

So we’re left with a group of people who’ve waited long enough to hear about what they might like, never mind what they won’t. And there’s a lot to like, so let’s dig into it.

Review

This is basically the same mechanism we saw in the previous Cobra, but this time you can see all of it at once. Which is cool because it’s a really clever mechanism. Atowak can’t take credit for that per se, but being able to engineer it for less than a percent of the price has to be commended in a way.

The simplicity of the display means it can be driven by a complete ordinary movement, with everything dial side modified for this wandering hours display on acid. You have the triangular module in the centre, which is geared to rotate once every three hours, and that’s so the hour-long minute display at the bottom takes one hour to traverse. It’s annoying this goes right to left instead of left to right, but Urwerk does this too, so I supposed it’s forgivable.

The clever part comes with the hour markers. You’ll see that the hours are engraved—and painted in lume—onto tapering cubes, each with an indicator tip poking out at the end. Each one has four numbers on it and rotates such that the next cube coming along is displaying the next hour in sequence.

The hour cube, as we’re now calling it, rotates at twelve o’clock, the furthest away it’ll get from the minute track on the lower half. How does it rotate? Such a thing seems like it would be more complex than fusion … but no. It’s deceptively simple.

Each cube is capped with complex watchmaking’s favourite gear, the Maltese cross. Imagine Vacheron Constantin’s logo as a gear, rotating from the centre, and that’s what each cube has got. So as the whole assembly rotates once every three hours, driven from the centre, as a cube gets towards the top, it encounters an obstacle.

I say obstacle. I mean pin. Just a little piece of metal poking out the dial that clashes with the Maltese cross. The cross can’t go through it, so because it can pivot from the centre, it rotates. The chunks missing in the corners of the Maltese cross allow the pin to clear it as the cube passes over without getting jammed. Just think of it like two gears meshing together just for one moment instead of permanently.

And that’s it. That’s why Atowak can even make this watch and not run into any problems, just because it’s so very simple. And that’s why you’re not paying $200,000 for it. There’s also a running seconds indicator in the centre, which feeds from the movement’s original centre seconds complication, for an extra little flurry of motion from the complex display.

The watches are limited to just 500 pieces and come in three colours, red, blue and green. Atowak has resisted emblazoning it’s not-so-great logo on the dial in font size one million, but it’s all still up there in a way that feels a bit, well, meh. Could do without that.

So if you’re happy with a Chinese watch that costs $1,649 and has a case the size of a small horse, and you’ve got an ungodly urge to buy an Urwerk you can’t afford, then the Tarantula may well be for you. It’s a niche of a niche, wrapped in an opportunity, but that doesn’t seem to bother the guys and gals at Atowak. They’re committed to reverse engineering some of watchmaking’s greatest secrets so you can enjoy them too.

It’s hard to believe how fast the time has flown by from being utterly floored by Urwerk’s original accomplishments to seeing them replicated for a fraction of the price. If I could make a wish, it would be to see the next stage of Atowak using its immense capabilities to branch out and try some unique complications of its own. I don’t think it needs to hide in the shadow of Urwerk anymore, and I’d be thrilled to review a product that comes in swinging 100% on its own merit. In the meantime, the Tarantula is as close as you’ll get to the Urwerk experience for less than $2,000.

What do you think of it?