Durability of Watches/Movements Made of "Black Gold"

3580 Views 12 Replies 6 Participants Last post by CometHunter, Apr 5, 2011

tom_hanx

Discussion Starter · Mar 30, 2011

Oh, the sweet torment of research... :biggrin:

Some of you have seen me falling head over heals the Zenith Elite Ultra Thin in another forum...

Well, in the permanent quest of perfection [just another way of saying "still do not have the cash to spend, so I'm trying to keep me sane"], I have started investigating alternatives, like the oh-so-awesome-looking NOMOS Zurich.

One thing I notice on the website is that the movement is listed as "Movement: ε (epsilon)—manufactory caliber with automatic movement, black gold". I did some reading on Wikipedia to find out that this is a 75% gold alloy with 25% of something else (depending on color variation).

I am posting to hear your thoughts on some of these questions:

- Is black gold alloy tough enough to last decades (pass onto next generation)?

- If price of the Zenith and the Nomos were equal: which one would you pick? Why?

- If you had to pick a dress watch and you had the choice - with or without date?

Thanks for your feedback :thumbup:

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kalessin

· #7 · Mar 30, 2011

Keep in mind that all 18K gold is 75% gold by weight, whether it be yellow, pink, white, black, green, whatever. That has nothing to do with its durability. A pure gold watch would be incredibly soft and not durable.

As was pointed out, there are several ways to make black gold but they typically involve the production of a surface layer by oxidation or deposition. It's unclear to me how durable this surface would be and it likely depends on the manner in which the black colour is achieved.

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