Inside Rolex: Instagram Animations

 By DANNY CRIVELLO

           

Some say Instagram was made for watch lovers. Rolex's account, which has garnered 10 million followers, is just beautiful. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I love the quick animation posts showing the inner-workings of the watch that Rolex sometimes shares on Instagram. I was able to pull some of my favorites and display them here.

Take a look at the Perpetual rotor self-winding mechanism, which is one of the 400 innovations patented by Rolex in the last 90 years. When Rolex watches have solid case backs, it is nice to see this:

Below is the Rolex silicon hairspring in action: 

I also love the animation of the vertical clutch of the Daytona. It works on the principle of friction contact between two discs, like the clutch in a car:

Below is the Triplock winding crown of a GMT-Master II, which has three sealed zones fitted with high-performance gaskets:

Another Rolex invention is the gas escape valve for the Sea-Dweller. It allows the helium trapped in the watch to be released at a given pressure during decompression. It is a one-way safety valve:

The very comfortable, yet robust Oysterflex. This animation shows the superlastic metal blade inside the Oysterflex:

The Rolex Deepsea can resist massive pressure exerted by water at the depth of 3,900 metres (12,800 feet), equivalent to a weight of about four tonnes on the watch:

Finally, let's take a look at the perpetual calendar of the Sky-Dweller. A "satellite" wheel rotates and orbits a fixed "planetary" wheel in one month. One of the satellite’s fingers receives an additional impulse on the four 30-day months, making the calendar disc jump from the 30th to the 1st to display the correct date: