A Week On The Wrist

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"We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." ― Marshall McLuhan

Andrew McLean started SeL Instruments in 2013 with a supermarket protractor, a couple of pencils, a compass, and a sketchbook. Now he's churning out hundreds of watches per year at a level of manufacturing that's simply unparalleled in America. Aside from the movement, every piece of metal (usually titanium or steel) that goes into the watch is machined in Arizona. SeL Instruments produces five models, and each one of those models is visually distinct from anything you've ever seen in the watch world before.

The designs are informed by McLean's professional background, which he simply summed up as the "consulting and contracting business," but his network of Navy SEAL buddies and Army Ranger-like build suggest there's more to the story. "We talk about failure modes in engineering, the way things fail," McLean says. Through his work as a contractor, he'd "experienced structural failures in watch cases, clasps, crowns, and bezels. I won't name names, but I had bought watches that I loved the design of, but they didn't work with my lifestyle. They ended up as a box of parts."

Every single element of an SeL Instruments watch was designed from the ground up by McLean to stand up to incredible abuse. The crown isn't at six o'clock just because it looks cool. McLean put the crown at six because "it's the most protected spot on the whole watch. 12 is probably the most exposed and three and nine can make the crown dig into a wetsuit and doesn't allow a dive computer to be worn alongside the watch."

The modus operandi of so many watch brands is to design watches for harsh environments, but for some reason, they all tend to arrive at similar designs that don't address some of the known shortcomings. Take spring bars, for example. "I hate spring bars. I truly cannot stand spring bars," McLean says. He hates them because they're usually the weakest point in the entire design of a watch, and even though a watch can be designed to be waterproof to thousands of feet, if a cheap springbar fails it's all for naught. "We use 3mm thick shoulder screws for our lug screws because they won't fail. It would rip your hand off before it would shear the crown off," McLean says.

He didn't want owners of his watches to have to buy specialized equipment to work on his watches, either. The aforementioned shoulder screws can be removed using a standard hex driver instead of specialized spring bar tools. You can pick up a hex driver at any hardware store. And no more spring bars shooting across the room during strap changes.

It's small changes to the design that increase ease of use and tactile quality. For instance, the bezel uses a "labyrinth seal" between the bezel and the case so simply turning the bezel while rinsing the watch will eject any sand or particles that get between the case and the bezel. And the bezel mechanism is a double-piston design that uses 16 ball bearings, which means that bezel action is silky smooth.

And the same sort of thinking has gone into the clasp, which McLean calls "Wavelock." Every single part is machined out of titanium in McLean's Arizona workshop. "I wanted a clasp with no moving parts, that anyone could open and clean," he says. "There are no springs or crevices to get dirty." There are a dozen 4-5mm adjustment increments and there's also a dive extension that adds 14mm to the length of the bracelet, which is machined out of Grade 5 titanium.

McLean has assembled a complete CNC shop where he can produce just about anything anyone can dream up, out of any industrial-grade material. His mission is to see American manufacturing celebrated and advanced, rather than shipping work overseas. He has provisional patents on all the engineering IP he's produced, so now it's time for him to help other brands move towards American-made. 

To learn more about SeL Instruments, check out the company website: SeL Instruments.

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