Heritage Mechanical (9S)

These are Grand Seiko's traditionally mechanical watches: a wound spring supplies the energy, and a balance wheel swings back and forth to regulate it. No quartz crystal sets their pace. The modern 9S movement series began in 1998, when Grand Seiko introduced its first new mechanical movement in twenty years.

That return involved more than putting an old mechanism back into production. Grand Seiko redesigned the movement and adopted a new testing standard, checking its rate in different positions and temperatures. The stated daily accuracy is the result of those controlled tests; an individual watch's performance on a wrist can differ.

Over the following years, the 9S series spread into hand-wound watches, automatic watches and models with a second time zone. In 2009 it regained something associated with the Grand Seikos of the late 1960s: a high-beat movement.

The 9S85 runs at ten beats each second, compared with eight in many modern mechanical watches. A faster balance can help the movement maintain a stable rate, but it also demands more energy and places greater demands on its components. Grand Seiko developed the springs and escapement for that job, retaining a running reserve of about 55 hours.

The Heritage name concerns the watches around these movements, not a different method of timekeeping. Their cases often revisit shapes established in the 1960s, with broad polished surfaces and clearly cut edges. The dials can be plain or highly patterned.

The blue SBGH267 brings those two strands together. Its high-beat mechanism marked twenty years of the modern 9S series, while the small symbols repeated across its dial reach back to the factories behind the earlier Grand Seikos.