Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Chronograph 26420ST OO A828CR 01 Watch Review

Hi, this is Tim of The 1916 Company. Welcome and thanks for logging on. If you love this watch, email me. Tim also at the1916company.com for purchase pricing and availability questions concerning this watch. This watch is an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore. This example right here, steel 43 millimeters with the bronze smoked dial. This came out in 2024 and it is 43 millimeters in diameter and steel. It is 14.5 millimeters thick from lug to lug, just the case. It's 53.4 millimeters. We include these little intermediate links. The total distance across the wrist is 56.3. It's on a lovely rubber strap. I'll throw it on my wrist, which is 16 centimeters in circumference and you can see it wears quite nicely. I actually think this fits me. The purpose of an offshore has always been to look a little bit too big and it does look a little bit too big. It's not as thick as you might think and across the wrist, you can see the downward angle of the lugs actually mitigates the fit issues. So, I'd say if your wrist is my size or larger, this can be made to work. You don't want it to look like a Datejust 36, but if bigger is the style, Panerai IWC Portugieser Royal Oak Offshore embraces the slightly too big sense of bigness. Taking a look at the strap now, you can see it features a feature. I know that's a bit repetitive and redundant, but this is a relatively recent addition to Royal Oak Offshore. It's the being that with these little pushers on the bottom, you can release the strap if you want to dress it up and you want to put it on leather, you can do so. If you want to dress it down, put it on some sort of a textile or rubber, you can do so as well. There's a matte finish here. You see visual extension of the plots, a little bit of a bevel extension from the hoods of the lugs alongside and because you can't really quick swap if there's a spring bar on the pin buckle, they give us a means of removing the buckle from the watch. So you can quick swap from the watch and also from the buckle. This little lock right there keeps everything in place. You can see outboard, we've got polish on the bottom, media blast and on the flanks, satin brushing. Taking a look at the case now, we have more of that satination. We have a few polished highlights. Notice that the bezel is not symmetrical all the way around. It's a little bit thicker at nine and three o'clock and then it slopes down and thins out at 12 and six. We've got beautiful metalwork. The hand finishing of the metal surfaces is a big part of what you pay for when you buy a Royal Oak because this is an offshore, the bolts in the bezel, they are hexagonal, but they're steel. On a standard Royal Oak, they would be gold. We also have a hexagonal ceramic shoulder in both polish and satin for the crown, which is a screw down. The watch is a hundred meters water resistant and we have ceramic chrono pushers again in satin and polish. We have crown guard structures fixed by hex screws, so if they get gouged, you can remove them and you can see how the bezel gasket is a prominent styling feature of the Offshore. The first Offshore's debuting in 1993, inspired by the original Royal Oak, but designed by a young Emmanuel Goethe, whose father, Jean-Claude Goethe, had been a prominent designer in the 1980s. And Emmanuel Goethe's design has stood the test of time, altered like the original Royal Oak, in subtle fashion over a long period. It retains all the hallmarks and attitude of the original. Part of that is that the Offshore is just a bigger, bolder watch. In addition to the greater water resistance, we have a chronograph layout here with a flyback functionality, so you can reset and restart without first stopping. Great for events that occur in rapid succession. We have a tone on tone design here where we've got sub registers with polished chapterings and then a brown bronze metallic fade from light at center to dark at the edge. A tachymetric scale, so you can use that with the chronograph to gauge the speed, such as a race car around a track or if you're at Reno, an airplane around a course. And then we have a couple of other functions too. We've got a hacking seconds function, so you can stop the watch. We have a quick set date and this caliber, the 4401, features an instantaneous jumping date as we sweep through midnight. You can see how that works right there. And that they have done a more than credible job of keeping all the numeral fonts and typeface consistent from chaptering to date to sub registers. They've done a very good job of that and realized that that kind of oversight is unworthy of a Holy Trinity brand. And yet other Holy Trinity members will make that mistake. We have blackened gold hands and indices on the dial. We'll do a lume shot so you can see it in the dark. No shortage of lume. Turn it all over. We can see that 32 millimeter diameter in-house caliber 4401. Now it's column wheel with a vertical clutch. You can see the column wheel here makes for very crisp operation. What's quirky is that this one of the few vertical clutch engagements you'll see where you can actually watch the vertical clutch in operation. And that's it. It's subtle, but it's there. You usually can't see it. The column wheel means it's a very crisp, positive feel. The vertical clutch means it starts without any jump, stagger, or extraneous motion. And if you wish, you can leave it running full time with no hazard wear or tear to the watch and advantage of a vertical clutch. Ceramic ball bearings, automatic winding, 22 carat rotor, and a 70 hour power reserve, a four Hertz beat rate, 40 pivot joules. The column wheel, the vertical clutch, we'll find the balance wheel here. It's doing a good job of hiding. It has a full balance bridge and a free spring balance gyromax style for shock resistance, as well as precise setting. You can see everything from stripes, which are very narrow and unusual, but effective look. We have beveling, we have polished screw heads. We have a lot of engine turning, including on bridges, which is uncommon and satination on some of the steel chronograph components. You can see there's beveling, polish, and then media blast on the rotor with solarization on the rotor center. If you love this watch, reach out to team also at the1916company.com for purchase and pricing details.