Audric watches are based in Singapore with a watch startup factory based in Neuchatel, Switzerland. At Audric, they are committed to delivering high quality and rugged watches and will be launching on Kickstarter soon.
The watch we’re looking at today is the SeaBorne 500m tool watch. It’s not a watch for the smaller wristed people out there. Measuring at 43mm in diameter and a large 51mm lug to lug meaning that this watch dominates the wrist and you won’t forget in a hurry that you’re wearing it, it also measures 15.4mm thick, sub 7 inches and I feel that you would struggle to pull this watch off. Dangle your wrist and this watch pulls your hand down, it’s not light on the wrist for sure.
I’ll start with the 316L stainless steel divers bracelet with solid end links that starts at 22mm and tapers down to 20mm at the clasp. The final production piece I’m assured will feature micro-adjustment on the clasp for better sizing, but after removing the screws from the bracelet links I found that I had no problem with sizing and didn’t need any micro adjustment. The bracelet is excellently done, with polished centre links and brushed outer links giving this watch a subtle contrast on the wrist, down to the Audric signed large clasp and it is brushed nicely. It features a double safety pusher to ensure there are no mishaps with this watch. The bracelet as a whole is excellently done and doesn’t nip the hair at all, which is a welcome relief for me .
The dial on this model is unbelievably striking but wouldn’t be my colour-way of choice. From an Instagram and review perspective, this colour-way was hard to take pictures of, it was hard to capture the real details and sometimes I felt as though the bezel and dial merged into one. But look at this one closely through the naked eye and the details are excellent, a subtle ridged sunburst pattern starts on the outer dial and makes its way in towards the centre. It’s covered wonderfully by a domed sapphire crystal with 5 layers of AR coating that produces some excellent distortion depending on the angle it’s looked at. The dial is a sandwich dial that you notice on close inspection and you see the bottom layer through the small minute holes that circle the dial. The applied indices are rhodium-plated, a material that provides a white, reflective surface and gives extra resistance to the indices tarnishing over time. The minute markers are laced with C3 lume whereas the indices are filled with white luminous BGW9 giving the lume a lovely contrast whilst both still burn brightly and last a very long time. Move on up the wonderfully layered dial and you reach the outer minute track that is split into three colours, red, yellow and blue, providing some much needed contrast to split the baby blue dial and bezel up. The writing on the dial at 6 o’clock reads ‘Seaborne’ and ‘500 metres’ but the writing is white and is pretty hard to read, it kind of merges into the dial, a different colour of choice would have been perfect here.
As mentioned before, the 120 unidirectional sapphire bezel colour matches the dial, it moves flawlessly with very little back play but again, wouldn’t be my colour of choice for the bezel. The bezel itself is polished and finished nicely with incremental ridges to help your grip when turning it. Moving down and around the case, at 9 o’clock you have a helium escape valve nicely polished in the middle of a brushed side panel.
On the other side, you again have a mix of polished and brushed finishing leading you towards polished crown guards that nicely guard the screw-down crown that will be nicely lumed on the production model. The watch screams boldness to me, it’s full of sharp turns and ridged corners, bold differences in finishes and all done marvellously.
Flipping the watch over to look at the screw-down case back and you’re greeted with a very nice (if not rather silly) etched design of a turtle. Showing that this is indeed made for deep underwater. The case back is nice, but it made me face palm when I seen that they decided to put a turtle on it. Beating away inside this watch is an Elaboré grade Sellita SW200-1, a 26 jewelled movement with a power reserve of roughly 38 hours that beats away at 28,800 beats per hour producing a nice smooth sweep of the seconds hand. This movement is precise and robust and it’s very nice to see a micro brand branch away from the more basic Miyota movements to use a more premium movement. It may raise the price of the watch but I feel that it’s worth it in this example.
The diving watch market is absolutely saturated with choices and due to the size I feel you would be taking a risk backing this project because you won’t be able to try before you buy. But even though the model I tried is only a prototype everything was finished excellently and it performed perfectly for me so I can only imagine the final production piece will be even better than this.
For more specs and information you can visit Audric’s official website here.
