The finishes are also faithful to the original with its radial-brushed bezel and polished bevels, pushers and crown. To ensure utmost accuracy, Zenith used the original blueprints and production plans of 1969 to recreate the angular architecture of the tonneau-shaped case. Unlike many vintage-inspired watches on today’s market, the case isn’t historically inspired it is an accurate reproduction made in stainless steel which respects the original 37mm diameter and 12.60mm height. The Chronomaster Revival Liberty flaunts a faithful reproduction of the case of the A384 of 1969. A year later, a stealth-inspired Revival El Primero A384 Shadow hit the scene with its matte grey titanium case and matte black and grey dial. To ensure the accurate reproduction of the A384, each part of the original El Primero A384 from 1969 was digitised. The standard El Primero A384 Revival, with panda dial.Īs you can imagine, the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the El Primero in 2019 resulted in a flurry of homage editions, including a highly coveted 1:1 re-edition of the A386 (part of a set) and a faithful revival of the A384, as well as the introduction of the El Primero 3600 calibre, a 21st-century take on the El Primero high-frequency movement. Epic events, the first marked America’s dominion in the space race, the second marked Zenith’s first place (El Primero) in the race to create an automatic chronograph movement – and a high-frequency calibre to boot! Two significant events took place in 1969: on 20 July Neil Armstrong took man’s first step on the surface of the Moon and, albeit on a smaller scale and entirely influenced by our bias for mechanical watches, on 10 January the watchmaking world got wind of the first fully integrated high-frequency chronograph movement. Today Zenith releases another revival of the A384 decked out in red, white and blue exclusively for the North American market in a limited run of 150 watches. With its tonneau-shaped case and panda dial, the A384 was a true child of its time and captured the zeitgeist of the Age of Aquarius to a tee. One of these was the famous reference A384. Following the introduction of the calibre in 1969, a trilogy of watches was released bearing the winning chronograph movement. The watch is available now for $8,200.Zenith celebrated an important milestone last year when the world’s first high-frequency automatic chronograph movement, the El Primero calibre, turned fifty. The Zenith Chronomaster Revival “Shadow” is offered on a black rubber strap with a cordura-effect texture, which fastens to the wrist with a pin buckle made of the same microblasted titanium as the case. The dial black is highlighted by three gray snailed subdials - small seconds at 9 o’clock, 12-hour counter at 6 o’clock, and 30-minute counter at 3 o’clock - and bordered by a gray tachymeter-scale flange.The hands and applied hour markers are rhodium-plated, faceted, and treated with white Super-LumiNova that glows a bright green in the dark. Inside, replacing the original’s manually wound chronograph caliber, is the most up-to-date version of the El Primero, the automatic 4061, with a speedy frequency of 36,000 vph, a lengthy power reserve of 50 hours, and a column-wheel-controlled stopwatch mechanism. The Revival version, nicknamed “Shadow,” retains the period-appropriate 37-mm case size of its predecessor (the same case configuration as the A384) but replaces the black-coated steel with dark matte-gray microblasted titanium. The unconventional model got a new lease on life last year when Zenith - in its thorough search of the secret, walled-off attic where Charles Vermot (more on him here) stashed the parts and documents that preserved the El Primero through the Quartz Crisis - discovered one of the nearly forgotten prototypes. Even official Zenith records of the prototype are scarce, and only a handful of longtime employees even were aware it existed. Only a handful were actually made, and none actually made it to market. One year after releasing the storied, steel-cased Reference A384, the first watch containing the self-winding El Primero, Zenith developed another chronograph, this one with a manual-winding movement, whose case was made of blackened steel, a rarity in that era. This year, the manufacture follows up that mega-popular vintage re-edition with the Chronomaster Revival “Shadow” - the modern reissue of a rare, legendary prototype that has languished in secrecy and obscurity since 1970. Zenith’s history-making El Primero chronograph caliber famously marked its 50th anniversary in 2019, debuting a number of historically inspired timepieces, including a revival of the very first El Primero watch from 1969.
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