Readable at 0430. Correct at 0900.
A tritium field watch that holds its light through the whole night, can't shed a strap, and still looks right under a dress shirt. Built for an officer's first real watch.
reveille · the bugle call sounded at first light.
The watch is built to still be legible when it sounds.
Pre-order notice, prototype photos, and final pricing. No other mail.
On the list. You'll hear before anyone else.
Technical illustration — not a photograph. Renders follow.
Three things that failed in the field.
The lume was dead by midnight.
Fifteen tritium tubesPainted lume needs light to hold light. Tritium doesn't. Fifteen sealed gas tubes sit in the markers and hands and glow continuously for over a decade — through a whole night, with nothing to charge and nothing to remember.
A spring bar failed on day one.
Fixed welded barsA spring bar is a hollow tube under tension holding your watch to your wrist. Ours are solid bars welded into the lugs. There is no failure point because there is no moving part. The strap passes underneath in one piece.
Everything tough looked like a toy.
Briefing-room correctForty millimetres across, under twelve thick, no rotating bezel, no numerals, no colour anywhere on the dial. A coarse blasted charcoal face and brushed steel. It reads as an instrument, not as a costume.
Specification.
- Case
- 40 mm · 48 mm lug-to-lug · under 12 mm thick · 316L stainless, brushed with polished chamfers
- Crown
- Screw-down, smooth, recessed at 4 o'clock so it never contacts the wrist
- Movement
- ETA F06.412 PreciDrive quartz · date · end-of-life battery indication
- Dial
- Coarse bead-blasted charcoal · applied brushed-steel batons · double baton at 12 · date at 4
- Illumination
- Fifteen green tritium gas tubes · markers, hour and minute hands
- Crystal
- Double-domed sapphire, anti-reflective coating on the inner surface
- Water resistance
- 100 m / 10 ATM
- Straps
- Two single-pass seatbelt-weave straps included, olive and black · 20 mm · brown Horween Chromexcel available
- Caseback
- Solid steel, left blank for engraving
James Popham
Army ROTC cadet · Coral Gables, Florida
I'm building this for the officer I'm about to become.
The idea started at Cadet Summer Training at Fort Knox. A spring bar failed on the first day of a ten-day field exercise. Later in the FTX I ended up sidelined in a holding barracks with a laptop, and I started looking for a watch that would fix what had just failed me.
I couldn't find one. Everything durable enough for the field looked wrong with a collared shirt. Everything that looked right cost more than a lieutenant makes in a month. The gap between those two was the whole problem, and nobody was building into it.
Reveille is the call sounded at first light. The watch is built to still be readable when it sounds.
So this is one watch, made properly, at a price a newly commissioned officer can actually reach — with a caseback left blank for whatever you want written on it, and a build meant to outlast the career it starts.
Where this actually stands.
No watch has been built yet. Here is the real state of it, updated as it moves.
Prototype photos, the final price, and pre-order access before it's public.
On the list. You'll hear before anyone else.