Feature: The incredible watchmaking of Hodinky Berkus

It’s very easy to get complacent and start to think you know everything there is to know about watchmaking. Well, as Czechian Ondrej Berkus took some time out of his day to demonstrate, I know even less than I thought. This is the wild story of a watchmaker called Hodinky Berkus. Stay to the end for the watch that really blew my mind!

Motor Barrel

Now, I debated for a while showing you these watches separately or showing them together. On the one hand I wanted to give each one the time and space to breathe, to let you appreciate them, but somehow that didn’t feel right. Why? Because the watchmaker behind Hodinky Berkus—hodinky is Czechian for watch, by the way—Ondrej Berkus, is a very unique individual, and really it needs this whole batch of five watches to get that across.

So let’s start with this little fella. That’s a chunky-looking titanium case at 38 by 11.5mm. It’s a pretty special watch for Ondrej despite being one of the most simple, because it’s the first for which he made his own gears. Previously, he’d scoured eBay for old movements and borrowed gears from them, refinishing them for his own use.

Now, the “making” part of watchmaking is usually the bit we kind of gloss over, because in most cases, even with the small guys, components come fully formed out of CAD and into the CNC machine, ready to be finished. That’s not the case here. Ondrej is a little more, how shall we say, old school. His CAD is a notepad and paper. His CNC machine is a lathe and a drill.

There are some more complex shapes like these numerals that he’ll get laser cut, but otherwise, like the gears here, he’s taking pieces of blank material and turning them out on a lathe himself. Good old-fashioned elbow grease and sweat, hunched over a bench in a workshop in the countryside. You know—like how watchmakers used to be.

This watch has another enlightening trick up its sleeve, a function that serves as a window into Ondrej’s mind. Instead of a normal mainspring barrel, it has what’s known as a motor barrel. A what, I hear you say? These were commonly used in railroad pocket watches where precision was very important, basically reversing the function of the mainspring barrel so the barrel turns when winding and the arbour, the axle running through it, delivers the power to the movement.

Sounds pretty cool, even if its function isn’t entirely clear, so Ondrej decided to make one. And he did, very successfully. He dug up old texts and figured out how to build one from scratch right there in his workshop. It was only after doing this that he discovered the purpose of the motor barrel is to protect a movement from the sudden, explosive destruction of the mainspring … which doesn’t happen anymore because modern alloys are better.

Duetto

So perhaps you’ll start to learn as we go through these watches that with Ondrej, really, there’s no masterplan, no strategy. He makes what he fancies and then moves on to the next thing. Each watch is unique, and I don’t just mean that it has a one-off colour scheme or something like that. I mean he makes one thing, is done with it and makes another thing.

One of those other things is this, one of the only watches that appears to actually have a name. It’s called the Duetto, because, as you’ll see, it has two balance wheels. Why two balance wheels? Well, Ondrej would likely say first and foremost because it’s really cool—and he’s not wrong—and secondarily to provide an average of the two beats into the movement for more precise timekeeping.

There are a few watches that have done similar. One is the MB&F HM9, an incredibly—and incredibly expensive—watch that’s quite the feat of modern watchmaking. So obviously Ondrej decided he could make one too in his farm workshop. Because how hard can it be?

Turns out, really hard. And not just because it was really hard, but because Ondrej decided to do it on extra hard mode. You see, the differential works just like it does on a car, combining two rotational driving forces turning at different speeds and combining them into one through 90 degrees. On other watches like this, such as the HM9, the differential is placed further up the gear train towards the mainspring barrel, where the speeds are low and the differential can be less precise.

But because Ondrej wanted it to look cool sat between the two balances, he needed it to operate at the highest speed found in the movement. And that meant everything had to—needlessly, I’ll remind you—be very precise. It took a while. Two and half years, if you’re counting. Oh, and to throw an extra challenge into the mix, he decided to make the 38mm case out of tantalum. You know, the material every watchmaker complains is too hard to make cases from. Yeah, he did it just so he could say it was easy.

Remontoire

So Ondrej likes to make things up as he goes along and that creates a certain level of flair and artistry in his work. It also presents certain … challenges, too. Take this watch, for example. You would think that perhaps the 39mm etched Damascus steel case might have been the hardest part, but no. That was easy. Maybe it was the blued steel balance wheel, completely unique to the watch, that made Ondrej almost throw in the towel. Not a chance in hell. He could do that in his sleep.

Perhaps the remontoir complication, a sprung capacitor if you like, that stores up the mainspring’s energy and releases it in one second bursts to provide even torque throughout the wind of the spring. That was very complex, of course, but this is the man, the myth, the legend Ondrej ‘Papi’ Berkus we’re talking here, so a little bit of metalwork and a little bit of swearing and it was all good.

No, the real challenge came with the power reserve indicator. Yep, a simple, straightforward power reserve indicator, like you get on an Oris. Why did it cause him so much grief? Let me walk you through it. Look at the back and you’ll see an impressive layering of gears, very complicated-looking.

If you start with the first layer, the ground floor, if you like, you’ll see they travel as you might expect from the keyless works—that is, the area near the crown that selects between winding and setting—all the way up to the mainspring barrel situated on the dial side.

But then you realise—as Ondrej did—that the power reserve is back over at the beginning where it all started. The power reserve feeds off the mainspring barrel, so the gear train had to march up and over, back along itself, to get to the indicator.

It’s like improvised jazz. It gets fast and loose and might end up seeming like a hot mess with no real way out—but there’s always a resolution. That’s watchmaking the Hodinky Berkus way.

Regulator

Now, you might have noticed that Ondrej, while expertly winging his way through various impressive complications, is by his own admission not great at finishing. It’s not that he can’t do it—more that he can’t be bothered. He’s thinking of getting someone in who is a bit more bothered. Meanwhile, while he enjoys working from one wild idea to the next, it leaves his watches with a certain, what a realtor might call, rustic charm.

Sometimes that charm is very much intentional. This Damascus steel case in 38mm, set with a blued titanium mainplate, is the perfect backdrop for Ondrej’s approach to watchmaking. This is a regulator watch with a cheeky little power reserve tucked in at the bottom, with each element of the dial side escapement looking like a steampunk battleship moored up in a retro-futuristic harbour.

There’s a hardness to his work that somehow marries precision with organic irregularity, and I kind of think it would be a shame to polish all that out. It’s like a device from a thousand years ago unearthed for the first time, only with a warranty.

But sometimes the Ondrej effect just so happens to work its way into the watch—well, let’s not call it anything it’s not—by accident. Those beautiful, white, glossy enamel displays were once beautiful white and glossy—that is until the metal beneath started to oxidise and discolour the enamel with faint, irregular spots.

He was tempted to redo them, but the consensus seems to be—and I’m included in this—that they look really cool just as they are. It’s only aesthetic, and it works perfectly with the rest of the watch. Two bright white eyeballs might have been just a bit odd. That is, even more odd!

Black Hole

About five years ago, before Ondrej really knew what he was doing—oh yeah, if you haven’t guessed by now, he’s generally making this up as he goes along with the help of a few friends along the way—he sketched a watch. It had a dished dial that tumbled into the centre, one great, curved hand emerging from the event horizon and a whacking great big tourbillon right in the middle. It was called the Black Hole.

That sketch sat in his notebook biding its time until Ondrej had the confidence to actually give it a go. He worked on it day and night until he had his masterpiece. And then it got stolen. Ondrej sulked for a bit as anyone would likely do, sulked a bit more and then made another one. And as anyone who’s ever lost work on their computer and had to do it over will tell you, the second time is always better.

There’s a 38mm case in mokume gane, a Japanese technique for turning metal into a woodgrain effect, set with a blued meteorite dial. There’s a one-minute tourbillon with blued balance and the giant hand emerging from beneath. Not only did this one take Ondrej a while because it’s a frickin’ tourbillon, but also because having the hand coming from the centre where there was also a tourbillon meant slimming everything right down so it wasn’t insanely thick.

So enamoured was Ondrej with the idea of making this a lost relic of an ancient, space-bound civilisation that he had friend and engraver Narimantas Palšis complete a pictorial scene of what those beings might have been like. At first glance it looks like a very traditional scene—that is, until you start to look closer.

There’s a buzz and a magnetism to Ondrej. The collector who’d purchased the Black Hole was excited to share the watch with me alongside the others Ondrej had brought and we spent a day chatting about them and learning what was going on inside Ondrej’s unusual mind. He’s a bit like Dr. Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, if only Dr. Brown had made a different kind of time machine.

There was absolutely no need for Ondrej to fly out to see me with the watches. They’re all sold. In fact, each and every one of his bonkers creations—whatever they may be—are sold out to like 2060 or something crazy. And it’s no wonder. Not only is each one a unique vision, but they’re also surprisingly well-priced. The cheapest one here is like €12,000, which is bonkers for a watch of this level. Ondrej truly is crazy.