So many hands, so little time...

[ATG]

saw this swimming in the 'Bay... wondered what you thought?

[Pascal S]

Ah, one of those funky Sinn 140 with the optional "double minutes" hands for the chronograph... So far, I haven't been able to find any truly convincing explanation for that other hand trailing the first by 10 minutes. I've read several times that it was for helicopter pilots and something about turbine idle time, but it doesn't make much sense to me. I'd definitely welcome being enlightened on the subject.

As far as the yellow "Zulu time" hand attached to the hour one is concerned, it had meaning back when Germany did not apply dailight savings time, as they were consistently 1 hour ahead of GMT, hence the double hands. Nowadays, it's nothing more than an oddity that makes sense only 6 months a year.

[DaveS]

We've had a look at this one before, and it has always jarred with me. I am fully aware of the doppelzeiger models, but to have one mit zwei doppelzeiger smacks of overkill.

I always thought that the variation in oranges on this particular watch (and I think this is the same example again and again) is too great to havbe been original, especailly as the main shafts of the chrono-minute doppelzeiger are a totally different colour to the other hands.

Coupled with the fact that the chrono-second hand is actually a regatta hand, not the normal 134x hand, and I am not toally convinced.

However, I would welcome the opportunity to be corrected.

One explanation of the 10-minute hand is the turbine warm-up times on helicopters, which I opriginally read in Jean-Michel's 5100 site on a rather later 142 (5100 powered).

However, the other one that is definitely true is for sailing race start countdowns.

You start the watch at the 10-minute gun and as well as having an elapsed time measure, you also have the trailing hand to tell you when the starting gun will fire. The same trailing hand also gives you an elapsed time for the whole race, even though you pressed the start button 10-minutes before it began.

If this was intended as a regatta watch, it might explain the regatta chrono-second hand (and mean that the GMT-CET doppelzeiger is the add-on on this example).

My Chronosport Chronosail had the same countdown feature.

Dave

BTW, here is a photo of a normal GMT doppelzeiger variant.



Photo by Schirra from Timezoneitalia