Reasons to Bid
The CronotempVs 8 grew out of a 2013 concept video by the Spanish collectors' club CronotempVs that imagined a 42mm Dornblüth with complications the German manufacture had never built. Dirk Dornblüth agreed to make it real, and members took personal delivery in Hamburg in November 2015.
Built on the manual-wind 99.8 calibre (a 99.2 derivative beating at 18,000 vph, in a 42 × 11.5mm case), it keeps the brand's marine-chronometer look with oversized off-center seconds, a power-reserve indicator driven by Dornblüth's beveled-gear differential, heat-treated hands and screws, and a stunning movement.
The club identity shows in subtle touches: an applied numeral 8, color shading in the railroad minute track, and a day/night indicator that flips the 12 o'clock index from red to black at 8 o’clock as a nod to the Spanish culture where the evening begins at 8.
The most significant engineering effort, and the part covered by Dornblüth's patent filing, was the moon-phase system. Rather than a conventional rotating moon disc, the Dornblüth x CronotempVs 8 pairs the moon-phase display with a dedicated countdown that counts the days to the next full or new moon. This separate countdown readout was the genuine novelty, since standard moon-phase complications only show the moon's current shape, not how many days remain until the next phase or which direction it's heading.
The mechanism also makes precise setting far easier, because the countdown gives an exact reference point instead of forcing the owner to eyeball the disc. That patented architecture proved important beyond this limited run. Only a small number of the bespoke calibre were ever made, with the rights held collectively by the CronotempVs 8 owners, but Dornblüth went on to develop the idea into a series production piece with the 99.6-M Mondphase, launched in 2020 in a more wearable 40mm case, carrying a similar countdown-style moon indicator.
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