A brief look at Buren, microrotors, and the Chronomatics...

> Mon, 24 May 2021

07:29

The Buren Watch Co. was founded in 1898. The company issued their first
automatic wristwatch movement, the cal. 525, in 1945. The watch ad below
features this pendulum style automatic movement.

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The pendulum automatic movements were not particularly effective winders and
were only produced for around five years. Buren would subsequently move to more
conventional full-rotor automatic movements such as their cal. 535 "Rotowind"
family, as featured in the watch ad below.

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The Buren microrotor movements were introduced in 1957, starting with the cal.
1000. These were used in the "Super Slender" watches as illustrated in this 1958
ad. Having the rotor encased within the movement, as opposed to overhanging the
back as with a full-rotor design, allowed Buren to offer quite slim automatic
watches.

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Here's a look at one of that first family of microrotor movements, a cal. 1010
badged for Dugena. The microrotor movements would be used by a number of
companies, including Bulova in their Ambassador line.

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This later Buren cal. 1321 movement is shown with the rotor removed, revealing
the jeweled rotor hub. By the way, the very large jeweled "window" sandwiches a
floating pinion that is able to slide to act as a reverser, transmitting power to one of
two gear wheels depending on which direction the rotor is turning in order to effect
bi-directional winding.

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The Hamilton Watch Company had been using various manual-wind and automatic
movements from Buren for some time when, in 1966, they acquired the Buren
company. Notable was Hamilton's use of the microrotor movements in their "Intra-
matic" and "Thin-o-matic" lines of watches. Below is an example, a 1970 Hamilton
TCA-5000 Thin-o-matic using a Buren cal. 1322 which Hamilton marked as their

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Grade 629.

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Another very notable use of the Buren microrotor movements was as the base of
one of the first automatic chronographs, the Chronomatic cal. 11. This was
developed in close competition to movements from Seiko (cal. 6139) and Zenith (El
Primero). The creation of a self-winding chronograph was a major accomplishment
in watchmaking. The result of a joint venture between Heuer, Breitling, and
Hamilton/Buren, utilising a purpose-designed Buren microrotor base movement
with a chronograph module designed by Dubois-Depraz, the cal. 11 Chronomatic
was introduced in 1969. Below is an exploded view of the movement,

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Here is an example of one of the cal. 11 Chronomatic watches, a 1969 Hamilton
Chrono-matic A.

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(Photo by Rob B).

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(Photo by Rob B).

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As Rob B. has owned and worked on a number of Chronomatic watches and
movements I asked him to give some comment on them from a
technical/developmental viewpoint, as follows:

"Since auto wind mechanisms were usually placed on the back of the movement,
integrating a chronograph mechanism had to be done in such a way so as not to
add any more height to the movement, making it so thick as to be impractical, even
clumsy. The Buren Watch Company had already developed a very neat version of
an auto wind movement, in which a small oscillating weight and its gear train were
mounted within the normal real estate available on the movement mainplate. The
time train had been shrunk in size and pushed off to one side making the necessary
room. The result was an automatic movement that was no thicker than a typical
manual movement of a similar diameter. Such an arrangement would lend itself
perfectly to building a chronograph on top of it, only adding a small amount to the
overall height and thus meeting the design goal of a thin automatic chronograph of
a practical and aesthetic design. The Cal. 11 is not simply a Buren Microrotor
movement with a chronograph module mounted on the back of it. It is a very
purposefully designed variation of the Microrotor movement, conceived in such a
way as to make provision for the possibility of a chronograph being fitted to the top
of the movement. That is, there has to be the locations available to place the hour
and minute register staffs to pass through the movement without interfering with
either the autowind mechanism or the time train, and having them end up in nice
sensible locations for the chronograph hand placement on the dial. Also needed was
some practical way of supplying driving power to the chronograph mechanism. So,
the result was the "bi-compax" layout we are quite familiar with, with the minute
counter staff passing right through the middle of the automatic weight axle, and the
hour register staff sneaking past the end of the winding stem. The layout of the
movement module constrained the design of the chronograph module somewhat,
with the result that the chronograph pushers had to be located opposite the stem,
giving us the familar "crown at 9" layout we see now. That layout left little option
for placement of the date, so it logically ended up at the 6 o'clock position.

The chronograph module, designed by Dubois-Depraz, is cleverly done with an

elegant simplicity that fulfills the requirement of center chrono seconds, a minute
register and an hour register. It is a cam-switched design, perfect for this module
as it is very flat in construction and very simple (comparatively) to make. The time-
recording part of the chronograph derives all of its power from a "tilting pinion",
which is driven by a wheel mounted on an extension of the third wheel in the time
train. This tilting pinion serves also as the clutch for driving the chronograph,
effected by tilting it to one side to engage or back to disengage it from driving the
seconds register. In a typical swiss chronograph, the hour register is driven directly
from the mainspring barrel. In the Cal. 11 design, as the barrel is not available to
drive anything, the 60:1 reduction needed between the minute register and hour

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register is obtained by a single tooth drive from the first intermediate wheel of the
chrono, which itself is driven by a single tooth from the center seconds wheel. A
very simple solution that does not require a complex gear reduction train. Very
neat!"

Further development of the Chronomatic resulted in the cals. 12, 14, & 15. Below is
a look at a Bulova cal. 12 movement (cal. 14EFAD) with the chrono module
removed, showing the microrotor base movement. The cal. 12 incorporated
changes including an increase in rate from the 19,800 bph of the cal. 11 to 21,600
bph.

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 (Photo by Rob B).

In the early-1970s Hamilton was in the process of being acquired by the Swiss

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conglomerate "SSIH" (Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère, later to become
The Swatch Group) and was fully owned by 1974. Production at Buren eventually
ceased and assets were sold off. The Chronomatic movements were used in a
variety of brand watches as late as the mid-1980s.

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Watches/movements from the collections of Rob B. and myself. Thanks to Rob for
his technical advice and photos.

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