Description

Romain Gauthier is entering his 18th year in business. Most have viewed Romain Gauthier with hand-finishing and he has created a watch that takes hand-finishing about as far as any Romain Gauthier timepiece to date.

It's a skeletonized version of Gauthier's Insight Microrotor with a movement made of natural titanium that has been laboriously hand-finished. It's available in a 42mm Carbonium-cased version. The carbon composite case is made from aerospace-grade carbon fibers that Romain Gauthier is sourcing from a French company called Lavoisier Composites.
It's made using a compression molding process in which epoxy resin and carbon fibers sourced from the aerospace industry are up-cycled into machinable blocks, from which things like watch cases can be made. Though it's more rigid even than titanium, and also twice as light, machining the material with optimal results required making a case of larger dimensions.
The Insight Micro-Rotor is one of the pillars of Romain Gauthier's collection of watches. It takes a Romain Gauthier anglage specialist 250 hours to bevel, soften, and hand-polish the titanium bridges and mainplate of each movement, and once all the various other forms of decorating are factored in, you're looking at about 350 hours of finishing work per movement.