Girard-Perregaux Minute Repeater Flying Bridges
Girard-Perregaux has been producing chiming watches since the 1820s, and the result of 230 years of craftsmanship is the Minute Repeater Flying Bridges. The centerpiece is the in-house GP9530, the manufacture's third entirely new caliber in under six months: a fully skeletonized automatic movement that pulls off something genuinely rare, pairing a minute repeater and a flying tourbillon with a self-winding micro-rotor without compromising the sound. To keep the chimes clean, the titanium mainplate screws directly to the case, gongs and their supports are machined from a single piece of metal, and the white gold micro-rotor runs on a jewel instead of a ball bearing so it winds silently. The 475-component GP9530 carries 1,340 hand-polished chamfers, 295 of them interior angles, and requires 440 hours of assembly and finishing before the watchmaker engraves their initials on the caliber and signs off. It all lives inside a 46mm pink gold monoblock case, 17.9mm thick, with box sapphire crystals front and back that double as acoustic chambers. Each one takes six weeks to complete.
