Review: Maen x Watchfinder Skymaster 38 MkIII
In 2017, a rare Rolex Daytona worn by the actor Paul Newman sold at a Phillips auction for $18m. Not only was it owned by a star of the silver screen and barbecue sauce bottles the world over, it also had a very rare dial that’s incredibly collectible. Today, unless you’re a very wealthy person, that look just isn’t available to you. I wanted to change that. So, I did.
This watch is only available from the 8th to the 16th of October 2023.
History
So, where did this story all start? I suppose you could say back in 1963, when Rolex decided to compete with the sporty stylings of Omega’s Speedmaster in an attempt to conquer not just the racetrack, but the race to space as well. It was a time when NASA was seeking a watch for use by its astronauts, when this new breed of chunky, robust, functionally driven chronograph designs were hitting the scene. For Rolex, it had the Daytona—or to give it its original name, the Cosmograph.
Slight problem was that the Cosmograph was as popular as a brain parasite. For whatever reason, it simply couldn’t repeat the success it had with the Submariner and GMT-Master, and even after a hasty rebrand to Le Mans, and then finally Daytona, the sales just weren’t there.
There’s that famous Antiques Roadshow clip where a veteran brings in his Paul Newman Daytona that he bought from new. He says he wanted a GMT-Master but couldn’t stretch to one, so he got the Daytona instead because it was cheaper and they even gave him a discount. Imagine.
Where things really get interesting is with the dial. The Paul Newman exotic dial, with its weird lumps and bumps. So the story goes, the Daytona was such a bad seller that dealers would not only offer them at discount, or freebies to incentivise the purchase of jewellery—and believe me, the irony of that is not lost on me—but they would even offer to swap out the dial to make the watch more appealing.
That dial swap would be to the exotic dial, done right there at the jewellers. I have an inkling there was an incentivised jewellery purchase involved when Joanne Woodward, then married to Paul Newman, picked out the watch for him. But… that dial. Why? It’s so unusual. And, as it turns out, it wasn’t limited to Rolex either. Not by a long way.
Watchmakers like Longines, Lip, Bucherer, Nivada, Vulcain, Candino, Yema, Winton, Wyler and many others all featured that same curious design. Trace the suppliers of those dials and it all comes back to one business: Singer. Singer was one of the biggest dial makers in the world at the time, furnishing greats like Omega and Universal Geneve, and these clients would come to them asking for new ideas to keep their designs fresh. If you’ve ever wondered why the dials on 60s watches all look so similar—that’s why.
And for Rolex, it wasn’t just the Daytona that got the exotic treatment. A rare concept watch, the Cosmograph Yacht-Master, which included a Regatta indication on the minute sub-dial, also featured it. It seems the design was very much a concept of Singer, not Rolex, and they weren’t just offering it to the highest bidder—but as it happens, any bidder.
Is there any rhyme or reason to the strange shapes of the sub-dial markings? I think that information has been lost to time. Perhaps it’s a way to make the very tiny sub-dial indicators more readable, where each bigger blob draws the eye to the thinner line. Or perhaps they just thought it looked cool. It was the sixties after all.
All in all, there were only some 2,000 Paul Newman exotic dial Daytonas made, and likely even less of the other brands. It seems a shame for this iconic and unusual blip to only be applicable to those with enough cash to build a fort out of it, which got me to thinking: what if I made my own?
Review
Maen is one of the microbrands we’ve featured a few times in the past, and I’ve been consistently impressed with not just the value for money their watches offer, but also my favourite thing: proportions. They’re not too big or too small, for my tastes anyway, and they balance all the details well without feeling like a hall of mirrors version of a vintage watch.
And the attention to detail is something I’ve really enjoyed too. It’s a hard thing to quantify in terms of sticker price, but very much makes itself known as soon as fingers touch metal. There’s no scratchy, sharp, pinchy bits here!
So, I threw caution to the wind and took a chance in asking if they’d allow me to contribute a design. To my surprise, they said yes. Just so happens they were working on the updated Mark III Skymaster chronograph, and just so happens that a chronograph is what I wanted to design.
Working within the basic perimeters of the Skymaster, I combined the steel bezel with a dial that borrows a whole bunch of vintage elements that I wish more modern watches would take advantage of. So of course it has the exotic dial, although here I switched the squares for circles as I thought it felt a bit less… blocky, I suppose. The watch is round so it seemed nicer to me that those were round too.
There’s a red chapter ring around the outside, a muted red with small, creamy lume plots. A lot of chronographs of the period were experimenting with introducing red and other colours into their typically monochromatic colour schemes, and here I thought it added some extra interest, a change again from the typically monochromatic colour schemes. It hides a little under the curve of the sapphire crystal, so it’s not too prominent.
The polished hour markers sit inboard on a raised step which floats above an ever-so-slightly off-white base. I’m personally a fan of using aged colours, but not to the extreme. Just enough to soften what would otherwise be overly stark.
And I think where that really comes to life is with the main dial. I was originally thinking of just a black dial, and then I thought about a brown dial, you know, to mimic the tropical aging some watches get—either naturally or with a little help, as it turns out. But the black dial felt too samey and the brown dial too try-hard, and so we figured out a compromise: a sunburst brown dial that’s almost black in some lights, and golden brown in others.
Even with our shots, it’s so hard to pick out just how nice that looks. Now, of course I’m going to say it looks nice, but it really does look stunning. The watch just changes so much. Even the red markers and cream dial. Look at it one moment and it’s like a box fresh watch, crisp and clean. Look at it again and the colours have all aged, and it seems like it’s been sat in a drawer for half a century.
Words can’t really express how pleased and how thrilled I am to have created this watch. I didn’t do much—virtually all the credit goes to Maen for the execution—but to see my idea come to life and for it not to be terrible is a reward in itself. That Maen managed to make it happen without compromise is an absolute joy.
I suppose I should say as well that this is a 38mm watch with 100m of water-resistance and a hand wound Sellita SW 510 Mb calibre inside. That means the thickness stays at a reasonable 13.4mm. I really like it on the tapered jubilee bracelet, although I bet it would look absolutely cracking on leather too. Oh, and it’s €1,800.
Here’s an amusing little side note. We started working on this watch, believe it or otherwise, before the announcement of the Rolex Le Mans Daytona with the exotic dial. I know they would’ve been working on it long before, but still, there’s a little part of me that feels very pleased to have been ahead of that curve. For whatever that’s worth!
I hope you like this watch as much as I do. I feel both nervous and proud to have actually made a proactive step into creating what I think is a positive addition to the community, however small. If you get one, I sincerely hope you like it and enjoy it. To meet someone out in the real world wearing one would just be… incredible. So thank you to Sebastiaan at Maen for making this happen, and thank you to you for putting me in a position where it could even be possible. I’m truly humbled and blessed.
