A Russian Gains Prominence Among Fine Watchmakers - NYTimes.com

“I started out selling watches in a small store that I owned,” Mr. Chaykin said in an interview during the Belles Montres watch show in Paris last month. “I began to fix watches myself. I would read up on watch repair from any and all sources I could find. Once I started reading and repairing watches, I never stopped.”

In 2003, he saw an exhibition of historic Breguet watches at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Inspired, he decided on the spot to create his own watches.

He started, with a confidence based on blissful ignorance, with a tourbillon — the complication invented by the 18th-century master Abraham-Louis Breguet that remains to this day one of the supreme tests of watchmaking skill.

“I learned that no one had created a tourbillon in Russia since 1917,” Mr. Chaykin said. “So I downloaded some blueprints, dug up some manuals and set out to build a tourbillon using my basic watch-repair tools.”

Most watchmakers take years to develop a piece from its first conception. Mr. Chaykin, “having fun,” finished his inside 12 months, presenting the first Russian-made “grand complication” clock in 2004. “I enjoyed building the tourbillon so much that I started thinking of creating other watches,” he said.

His first pieces lost him money but gained him the attention he needed to build a full-time business, making watches to order.

Mr. Chaykin credits some of his success to his unorthodox horological education. “In my opinion an academic background teaches students to think in certain ways and limits them to certain rules,” he said.

“In my case, I learned everything as I went, on a need-to-know basis,” he said. “I think that my lack of formal schooling left me with an open mind.”

Mr. Chaykin makes it sound simple. And perhaps, to him, it really is. Since 2004, he has created a multitude of calibers manufactured in-house, and taken out 30 patents.

“I just don’t have the time to develop all of my ideas,” he said.

In 2012 alone he filed 12 patent applications for watch movements. The brand, not yet 10 years old, now markets five watch collections and five clock collections.

His most recent watch, the Quartime, perhaps best epitomizes his Russian identity. While most of the Western world divides the day into two halves — a.m. and p.m. — Russians tend to think in terms of four quarters: morning, day, evening and night.

“Typical ways to describe time in Russian include phrases such as ‘I woke up at 7 in the morning’ or ‘I will stop by at 2 in the afternoon’ or ‘Someone was making a lot of noise at 11 at night,”’ Mr. Chaykin said.

Using revolving indicators, the Quartime presents these four time sections, each allowed a six-hour window.

Mr. Chaykin had already shared his national pride in 2010, when he presented his Lunokhod model, a timekeeping homage to the Russian moon rover program of the early 1970s. At the watch’s dial center, a black rhodium-plated silver mask covered a 12-millimeter, or almost half an inch, Wootz-steel orb, accurately portraying the earth’s shadow cast on the surface of the moon.

“When I began creating astronomical complications for clocks and watches I began to study astronomy. I immediately noticed that most watches present the phases of the moon with symbols, which do not represent what is happening in the sky visually,” he said. “So I decided to create a watch which would present a realistic picture of how we, on earth, see the moon.”