When this watch is running, the seconds hand is a capital letter B turning slowly around the centre of a patinated brass landscape dial. That B is the client's own initial, and it sits inside a 33.5 mm dial housed in a 39 mm stainless steel case. The whole piece was commissioned by a son for his father around the theme of 'The Root of Our Legacy', and the details carry that idea through from front to back.
The construction is where Rexx Timepieces clearly put in the hours. The artwork was drawn as vectors in laser marking software, then a galvo fiber laser etched the landscape and root motif into the brass. A patination fluid chemically darkened the surface, and sanding and polishing afterwards brought the brass details back out. The dial edge was deburred and shaped with a flat hand file and a round needle file, and a rotary tool with a buffing wheel handled the polishing alongside a hand abrasive pad.
The details that stand out to me are the layering of the scene itself: mountains, radiating sunbeams, winding pathways and root-like branching veins, set against applied polished gold-toned rectangular baton indices. The hands end in an open circular hub holding that same letter B, the winding crown carries a reverse-etched B to match, and the case back reads 'THE ROOT OF OUR LEGACY' and 'EVERYTHING WE ARE GREW FROM HERE'. Even the rotor is engraved with two brothers walking together, and the dark brown alligator-patterned leather strap finishes it off.
One thing worth thinking about: the engraved artwork only reads because the darkened layer is cut back by hand sanding and polishing. In my view that looks like the most delicate step in the whole process, since the contrast between the darkened ground and the exposed brass lives or dies on that finishing work.
Project by Rexx Timepieces. Watch it on their YouTube channel: