In my alarm watch collection another unusual watch has arrived. I want to share with you some basic information and impressions about the watch. I am talking about Boegli musical alarm watch (Boegli Reveil Musical Mecanique Alarm).
Boegli is a swiss watch company which specialized in making so called musical watches. By musical watches it is meant that "standard" mechanical watch has also a mechanical musical box inside the watch case and this can play desired music when wanted. The choice of the watches is quite big, mainly are pocket watches, but also wrist watches are in their offer. You can find more information about the company and their watches on their webpage www.boegli.com
I have no idea why would someone like to have this kind of watch nor can I even understand the purpose of that kind of watch but there obviously is an interesting niche market for them.
All watches are hand made and each client can choose his own among several different musical boxes and melodies. So it is no surprise that Boegli watches are quite expensive and can be treated as exclusive watches.
Well, some 15 years ago Boegli made a a musical watch where music box actually has a true purpose. Namely in this alarm watch music box replaces alarm hammer and music starts playing when alarm is activated. Unfortunately - as far as I know - this model is not in production anymore, I was quite lucky to find one new old stock on the ebay.
For the developing of this watch Boegli used as a base Poljot 2612.1 alarm movement. I have no idea, if they have bought some old stock of existing movements from Poljot or they have bought just construction details and made their own. What can be seen from the picture is that they used better materials for the movement parts and that bridge is stamped "BOEGLI" and even "SWISS MADE"! They have also of course changed the alarm function so their movement does not have spring barrel for the alarm, movement has also lost the hammer and a pin to which hammer strikes in standard Poljot 2612.1. movement. That is why also arm crown has lost almost all functions - it serves only for setting the alarm hand, while winding and on/off functions are dummy. It is strange that movement still has 18 jewels even though important (moving) parts of the movement are omitted.
On the other side, watch has a third crown, which serves for winding the musical box and also to set alarm on/off. So in position 0 (crown in) winding the box is possible and alarm is activated while in position 1 (crown out), alarm is deactivated.
So basic movement on the time when alarm is set activates music box to play instead of hammer buzzing against the pin.
"Alarm" rings much longer than original Poljot, music plays almost 2 minutes if fully winded (original Poljot buzz last only 14 seconds).
All those changes were obviously so distinct that Boegli dared to declare this movement to be "Swiss made".
On the first look watch is enormous. Dimensions in mm are 55x35x16. Without crowns, of course! On the wrist it is not soooo big, probably due to the width of only 35mm But to be honest it is not a great pleasure wearing it :)
It is also not nice at least for my taste. But I was surprised how many positive feedback watch receives regarding the general look. And it certainly captures a lot of attention. Comments just can't be avoided. And if suddenly Vivaldi start playing during some meeting, attention is guaranteed. BTW, beside Vivaldi, Mozart was also an option in this watches.
Hands have some poor luminova, hardly worth mentioning. "Alarm" crown is big and quite annoying. Winding crown on top is not practical for everyday use. Even when taking watch off the wrist winding is difficult, not to mention that while on the wrist winding is and setting time is almost impossible.
I would for sure change positions of the time and alarm crowns, so that they would be positioned 90 degrees on the right, but that would by my opinion cause a lot of technical issues in connecting alarm trigger with musical box.
Just to get the first impression, I shot a short video so that you can hear a short part of watch playing Vivaldi. Enjoy.
P.S.: This article was in shorter version first published on watch forum Portal Satova on November 2020.
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