REVIEW: CARTIER Tank Basculante Mecanique – Quality over Quantity

I think one of the skills that I have been constantly working to improve is the ability to communicate complex and tricky concept in the most concise way possible without compromising the message’s complexity. In my line of work (Yes, I do have a day job), this skill is extremely important as executives only look for the key insights not the details. I think the idea at the core of this skill is something everyone is very familiar with: quality over quantity. I also find myself applying the same idea and concept working through my watch collection. This Tank Basculante Mecanique is special in a way that it isn’t just a piece to celebrate a personal achievement, but also a piece that acquired through letting go a number of high value watches.

From a glance this piece looks like any normal CARTIER Tank, but it is actually very different from the vintage and even the modern Tank. The reason is in its name, Basculante. Basculante means “to flip”, which stands for the mechanism where you can flip the watch face downward. This mechanism was designed to allow the wearers to protect their watches from impact by hiding the sapphire crystal side on the inside of the case. Because of the flipping mechanism, the crown and the signature blue cabochon have to move to the top of the watch case, and fully integrated in the flipping hinges, which I think makes the watch looks quite sleek with the case not being interrupted by the crown.

Now here comes my favorite feature on this Basculante, the guilloche dial. Guilloche is a technique of carving small patterns on to the surface, in this case the surface is the watch dial. Every watch brand has its own way of guilloche, and I think Cartier’s guilloche is very iconic. The carving on this Basculante is not too deep so that the dial actually looks flat from a far. I actually have trouble capturing the pattern without moving taking a close up shot. But when you move up close, the guilloche is truly captivating.

The movement of this Basculante is both impressive and annoying. This Baculante is using the Frederic Piguet caliber 6.10 (Cartier calls it the 610), which is a manual time-only movement that is ONLY 15.2mm in diameter and 2.1mm thick. To put it in perspective, the thickness of any normal A4 paper is around 0.1mm, which means this movement is around 20-A4 paper thick. The Frederic Piguet 610 is considered a high-end movement, and it actually runs on par with my Co-Axial Chronometer rated Omega caliber 2500 in my Seamaster SMP 300. That is impressive. The annoying part here is winding the watch. Because the crown is integrated into the case, it is extremely cumbersome to wind the watch because it’s impossible to get one full wind. You do get used to it though.

Having owned both the quartz and the mechanical version of this watch, I’d say they wear completely different despite being the same Basculante model. You might think that the different case sizes play a role here with the mechanical bigger than quartz. But I think the reason why these watches wear different is the leather strap size. The quartz version’s lug width is 16mm and the strap tappers down to 14mm, whereas the mechanical version’s lug width is 20mm and the strap tappers down to 18mm. 20mm leather strap wears much bigger, makes the watch feels much sportier, and I think looks better on men’s wrist size 15cm or above. Whereas the 16mm strap feels more unisex, wears much more like a traditional Tank, and can fit wrists as small as 13cm.

To circle back to my point of quality over quantity, this mechanical Basculante doesn’t have much going on, but every detail is executed to near perfection. Simple case design with subtle but very fine guilloche dial, sourced movement but very high end and accurate, wears big but elegant, everything is done perfectly. I definitely don’t regret going through 3 different watches to ultimately acquiring this mechanical Basculante. It helps me slim down my watches to a number of pieces that I can practically wear and fill in the gaps that my other watches could not before.

By Daniel Q