Roger Dubuis Presents its Innovative Excalibur Twofold - YouTube

Hello and welcome on TheWATCHES.tv and today we will go over one of the new timepieces

introduced by Roger Dubuis, the Excalibur Twofold.

The real novelty doesn’t concern too much its mechanical aspect but has more to do with

the special cooking ingredients that I have here on our table for which Professor Suzanne

will give you a much more detailed understanding of their specificities in a sec.

But before this, just wanted to say that a few years back Roger Dubuis was going in many

directions, trying new collections and so forth even though they had one watch which

clearly had and still has a strong enough personality to carry the brand and that’s

obviously the Excalibur, in particular in its Double Tourbillon configuration,

a distinctive signature of the brand.

So in this Twofold, well we naturally find this double tourbillon movement with its differential

mechanism between the two tourbillons to average out their chronometrical performances

and this movement is highly skeletonized, also a design characteristic of Roger Dubuis.

It’s a movement made of 301 components, hand-wound and offering 50 hours of power reserve.

The piece we had the chance of filming here at the Club was the prototype version and

all in all only 8 Excalibur Twofolds will be made and available only in Roger Dubuis

boutiques and they have more than 8, so I don’t know how they will handle this, but

am sure they’ll manage.

Anyhow, let’s now go to Suzanne to understand more about the true innovation regarding this timepiece.

Hello everyone, today we have with us the new release of Roger Dubuis — the

Excalibur Twofold.

If you’re seeing this watch for the first time, without having heard any previous information

about it, you might think, hey that’s a cool looking watch, I guess it’s white ceramic?

That, my friends, is an incorrect guess.

Because you see, the Roger Dubuis Excalibur Twofold is not made of white ceramic, it’s

made of something new and different, called MCF.

What’s MCF?

It stands for Mineral Composite Fibre, which gives you a clue as to what it’s actually made of.

Similar to a material such as carbon fibre composite, there are two essential components to MCF.

You have a matrix of fibres, filled with epoxy resin, which acts as a binding agent.

But that’s where the similarity ends between carbon fibre composite and MCF.

Most of the carbon fibre that you see in watch cases is created from pre-made sheets of carbon

fibre and epoxy.

You stack them up, add more epoxy, apply heat and pressure, and you get a three-dimensional

solid mass.

With MCF, you start with fibers.

What fibers?

Fibers of amorphous silica.

Some of you are thinking, amorphous silica?

Like silicon dioxide?

That’s glass!

This is fibreglass!

No it is not.

Fibreglass contains silicon dioxide.

Silica is silicon dioxide.

That’s the difference.

It’s like, charcoal contains carbon.

Diamond is carbon.

Do not propose to your girlfriend with a charcoal ring.

Oh baby it's the same thing. It is not the same thing.

Okay so, fibres of silica.

For those of you who really need to know the details without researching a bunch of patent

documents, these fibres have an average length of 0.64 millimetres and a diameter of between

1.2–1.4 microns.

These fibres are put through a hydrocyclone to purify them and then through a centrifugal

extractor to enmesh them.

At the end, what you have is a uniform solid, which looks like a dense, bright white foam.

This white foam is highly specialised, they use it as thermal insulation on space shuttles

to keep them from burning up when they re-enter the atmosphere.

This white foam is then injected, under heat and pressure, with a very specific UV resistant

epoxy resin.

It’s originally transparent, this epoxy, but white pigment has been added to it here.

This UV resistance is very important, because it stops the colour and structure of the material

from degrading when exposed to ultraviolet light, which is, you know, basically radiation.

And there you have it.

Silica fibers, compressed into a homogenous foam, plus white UV-resistant epoxy resin.

That’s the case of the Roger Dubuis Excalibur Twofold.

And just so you know, this is not something that’s available anywhere.

Roger Dubuis worked with highly specialised partners to develop MCF, and they have exclusive

use of this particular formula.

Why develop a whole new material instead of just using white ceramic?

First of all, a block of MCF is so much easier to machine than ceramic.

You can get pretty complex shapes now with ceramic, compared to just ten years ago, but

the fact that it involves a multi-stage sintering process is just a pain in the neck

when it comes to smaller components.

Creating this white skeletonised component on the dial in white ceramic?

Not impossible, but a nightmare.

With MCF, no problem.

Secondly, you can really be consistent with the colour when it comes to MCF, whereas for

ceramic, different components are generally made separately and you can have slight variations

in shade.

Doesn’t matter as much for black ceramic, but it’s really obvious in white ceramic.

I don’t want to say that MCF is an overall better performer than white ceramic, but it

performs better in those areas that Roger Dubuis prioritised when they were creating

the Excalibur Twofold.

There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t mentioned, the standard things you would expect from

a composite material like this — very light, rigid, non-reactive — because I wanted to

tell you guys more about the aspects of this watch that you won’t hear anywhere else.

Another thing.

The strap glows in the dark, it’s been embedded with luminous rubber, which is another innovation.

This one doesn’t glow, because it’s a prototype strap, but you’ll see it when

it comes out for real.

Ok, I hope you enjoyed this, thanks for watching, see you real soon and Viva Watchmaking!