Adam was taken with its design and beauty, but, as is the case with 99.9% of us, couldn’t obtain the watch for himself. So, he did something that most non-engineers would consider to be impossible–he made his own. Well, not a tourbillon watch, rather a large scale 3D printed, triple-axis tourbillon, following in the foot steps of Nicholas Manousos’ Tourbillon 1000% and Christoph Laimer’s 3D Printed Watch with Tourbillon.

Adam wanted to bring this technology into his home, and make it accessible to others who aren’t dropping 200k on a watch anytime soon too. It’s worth noting at the outset that while Adam is a talented engineer, he is not a watchmaker, nor does he have any training. He designed and created this triple-axis tourbillon with a working Swiss lever escapement through research and by simply watching the Deep Space in action on YouTube.

So, over the course of several months, Adam went about backwards-engineering a triple-axis tourbillon and designing it to be large-scale and 3D printable. There was a lot of trial and error, beginning with getting the screw balance escapement to work. As Adam put it, the first 95% was actually fairly easy (I imagine for an engineer), but the last five took a while. He worked to improve every little detail to make the whole thing more stable and efficient. One thing that might be apparent to the savvy out there is that there is no immediately visible power source (barrel) for the tourbillon. Instead, hanging via a fishing line is a 2.5lb weight. Initially, it took 30lbs to drive it, which is the kind of detail that through refining gear ratios, etc, Adam was able to achieve.