A WATCH MOTOR OF THE NEXT GENERATION: THE NOMOS AUTOMATIC CALIBER DUW 3001

It took around three years, and now it’s finally ready: NOMOS Glashütte presents DUW 3001, an entirely new standard caliber from the Glashütte watchmaking company. What makes it so special?

At only 3.2 millimeters high, this motor is incredibly flat—flatter than almost anything else that self-winds and is produced in series in the watchmaking world—and yet extremely accurate. The few other slender self-winding calibers on the market are either not particularly precise or extremely expensive. However, NOMOS Glashütte is not leaving its established price range with its new caliber.  
 
How did they manage it? Not without a few tricks. Less space means, of course: less room for tolerances. “We had to half some of the production tolerances in DUW 3001,” says Theodor Prenzel, 30, the design engineer behind it. “So our new movement is constructed with extreme precision, which is why it can be ultra-flat and also incredibly accurate.” Almost all the parts in DUW 3001 are inserted between the base plate and the three-quarter plate—the ratchet wheel, for example, now disappears entirely underneath them, and so had to become even flatter than it already was. “Our construction space was, on average, only a millimeter high,” says Prenzel.
 
The result is that DUW 3001 is a chronometer-standard, high-quality, and very elegant NOMOS caliber—unique in the watchmaking world. Now the watchmakers are ready for series production of the flat automatic caliber: The new NOMOS watches featuring this movement will be initially available within the new Tangente Automatik and Minimatik models available late summer from Stewart’s.