Octopod Desk Clock is the latest weird clock-art creation from MB&F in collaboration with Swiss clockmaker L’Epée 1839.
The new Octopod clock – created in three versions (50 with legs in black PVD, 50 in blue, and 50 in palladium) – is inspired by the octopus. It has eight individual kinetic legs that are each built using 31 different parts and that are all adjustable in height. They can each be released via a button and locked in a standing or extended (“crouched”) position. It also features a transparent spherical head upon those legs that can swivel and move.
MB & F Octopod Desk Clock
The entire movement is held in place by a mineral crystal baseplate treated with anti-reflective coating on both sides to create the effect, the brand tells us, of invisibility so that the movement appears to be somehow suspended. Then there is the hand-wound movement itself that MB&F tells us was designed from the ground up by L’Epée. It displays the hours and minutes with the regulator mounted on the minute hand itself. MB&F notes that the counterweight to the heavy minute hand was a particular engineering challenge that was eventually solved with the use of five adjusters. The movement operates at 2.5Hz with eight days of power reserve, and it is wound and set by “double-depth square socket key sets.”
MB & F Octopod Desk Clock
All together, the MB&F Octopod is made of 309 parts, weighs 4.2kg, and measures a square 28cm high by 28cm long when in “standing” position. In “crouching” position it will be 22cm high and 45cm long. The “glass sphere” is actually two Polycarbonate semi-spheres joined at the satin-finished three-piece center band. There are even twelve hour markers with 12, 3, 6, and 9 helpfully indicated in Arabic numerals meaning that it should also be able to serve its purpose as a reasonably legible clock.
The MB&F Octopod is limited to 50 pieces in each of the three different color versions with a pre-tax price of CHF 35,000.
