Blog

European Watch Review: Vostok-Europe Energia Bracelet Watch

Posted by Craig Hester on Sep 15th 2019

European Watch Review: Vostok-Europe Energia Bracelet Watch

Hey everybody. Craig Hester here with R2Awatches.com thank you for joining us today as we continue our journey together through the watches that are available@R2Awatches.com. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure and hit like hymns like and subscribe. Easy for me to say. If you are watching this on Facebook you want to join the Vostok-Europe Timepieces group on Facebook. It is the most active group of fans of our watches and it is a private group. You do have to ask to join. You want to do that and you will not regret it. It is a great group. Today we are talking about the new bracelet for the Energia collection from Vostok-Europe. Now fans of our watches, especially people who've owned the energy for a while now they've been waiting for this bracelet so that's the primary focus of this. Although I am going to do a tour of one of the Energias one of the newest ones with the power reserve, YN84 movements.

I am going to do a tour of that as well, but the bulk of this is going to be talking about the bracelet. If you're not familiar with Vostok-Europe, Vostok-Europe is a boutique watch brand based in Vilnius, Lithuania, which by the way is 25 miles from the center of Europe. People tend to forget that big chunk of Russia is actually in Europe including Moscow and St Petersburg. But we tend to refer to it as East Europe even though it is very close to the geographic center. They are based in Vilnius, Lithuania. They are a boutique watch brand. Every watch is custom designed there. They are custom built and they are hand assembled there. If you want to know more, we have a lot of great videos at R2Awatches.com or at the R2Awatches channel on YouTube where you can learn more about this wonderful brand that we are so proud to represent here in North America.

So let's jump right in to the watch. First of all, I've told you many times you know that every Vostok-Europe is based on a story. They start with a concept and then they build a watch around that concept. The Energia is no different. It is based on this rocket here. This is the world's largest rocket, not the one that I had my finger on. That's a model of the world's largest rocket. But this is what it looks like in real life. This is the rocket system that was put together to put the brand space shuttle into space. The brand space shuttle being the Russian version of the space shuttle. It's an amazing piece of technological and engineering and it was a really cool idea to use this as an inspiration for a Vostok-Europe watch. If you look at the way that the Energia is designed and you, and you look at the booster rocket system and the asymmetrical construction of that, you can see how these bump outs and the way the case is designed, how the lugs are designed.

You can see the inspirations that come from the Energia rocket. It is interesting Costa who is the chief designer at Vostok-Europe. One of the things he doesn't, you'll, you'll see a lot of watches where they take a direct inspiration, like maybe they take a dashboard clock or a cockpit instrumentation or, or a shape of something Costa tends to like find one or two little interesting things within the design. And then he, he draws off of that and creates something new and unique from the original inspiration. And the Energia is no different than that. Okay. I said I was going to be talking about a bracelet. So let me get into the bracelet then we'll get back to this specific model.

People have been asking for quite some time for Vostok-Europe to build a bracelet to go with the Energia. I'm gonna tell you that actually Igor Zubovskij, who's the managing director of Vostok-Europe. He was actually a little reluctant about this in the beginning as I recall. And he may correct me and tell me no, he always thought this was a great idea. But as I recall, I think he was a little reluctant. Reluctant, yes. That's a new word. Add that to your vocabulary. Reluctant to do so in the beginning because this does make this an extremely heavy watch. If you are not a fan of big heavy time pieces, you do not want to pick up the Energia on a bracelet. If you like big aggressive, bold, heavy timepieces, this is the watch for you. I think you know, we know that not everybody is gonna want a bracelet this heavy, I mean the bracelet itself is heavier than a lot of watches and when you combine it with the 48 millimeter heavy duty watch, that is the energy you are talking about a pretty aggressive package in terms of weight and size and all the way around on your wrist.

I mean, look at this. Let me see how many millimeters this bracelet is, is 4.9 millimeters thick, 4.9 millimeters thick. That is just off the hook. I mean this is a thick aggressive and there are no folded links or anything in here. This is all surgical grade stainless steel. So one of the things that's really, really cool about this particular bracelet is the way they did the micro adjustment on it. You see how there are two pushers here. Now this pusher is for your deployant clasp. And by the way, just look at how heavy the deployant clasp is. I mean it's just, wow, I'm blown away by the quality in this bracelet and you will be too look at the fine adjustment. You pushed this button in and it's a slider. You don't have to, you know, have a lot of fine adjustments.

You have to take the pen and you push in the pen and it's there, your standard pressure pen and then you got to move it to the other one. You got to make sure that pen slips in there, right? And one of the things that always happens to me is the pen ends up being like all messed up like this where it's stuck in one this way and one that way and trying to get it lined up. You have none of those issues with this strap because the micro adjustment is simply a sliding bar that you push these buttons together and when you want it in the right position, you just let go and it locks in place. Another thing that's awesome about this, because this is a true professional grade dive watch. If you are a diver or anyone who wears extra fit clothing for whatever activities sporting activity you're involved in, you can open it up all the way and it's a lot easier to put this over a wet suit, particularly when you have the micro adjustment fully open and you have the deployant clasp open, you're going to be able to fit this over pretty much any wet suit, which makes putting it on a lot a lot easier.

So the thoughts, the thoughtfulness of design and engineering that went into this, you know, that's really what I'm trying to get across is that it's not just about that this is a heavy duty bracelet that is made like built like a tank, and kind of looks a little bit like tank tracks on there, that wasn't intentional but anyway, it's built like a tank. It's also got some really thoughtful design elements in it that make this watch a pleasure to wear. Now I want to show you the watch on the bracelet. I'm going to show you the, let me see which one this one is. This is the, ignore that. That was a problem with our prop department. This is the A539 which is the YN84 movement. Now the A539 is the, it's got the yellow accents on the charcoal, not quite black.

This is definitely a charcoal set of coloring on here and we decided to use this one to show you what it looks like on the bracelet. It still has the split lug system for the bracelet. You actually have to remove a couple of those little round pieces when you put the bracelet on a, it's a different configuration than the leather. Everything else about the Energia is the same, but since I said I was going to, I am going to give you a brief rundown of this particular model. First of all remind you of some of the specs of the Energia. The Energia is 48-49 millimeters depending upon whether you're including the little bump outs that are on the bottom of of the of the case or not. Let's see how thick it is. It is 15 and a half millimeters thick. That is a very thick heavy duty watch.

Again, I remind you if you're not into big heavy watches, the Energia on the bracelet is definitely not for you. It does have the K1 mineral crystal system, K1 mineral crystal is the same system as what is called gorilla glass. That gives you the best of both worlds in that it is right in the center on the Mohs' scale between Sapphire and mineral. It gives you nearly the shatter resistancy of mineral and nearly the scratch resistancy of Sapphire. Also all crystals on Vostok-Europe on the sport lines of Vostok-Europe are very thick, heavy duty crystals. Now I'm actually showing you a crystal from the expedition North Pole and not from the Energia but it is, it is quite similar. This crystal is three millimeters thick. Now think about that. That's all. That's not that much thinner than the actual bracelet I was showing you.

So that just shows you the quality of construction here. I did mention that this has the YN84 movement from Seiko that has the power reserve. I'm going to show you how a power reserve works. So a power reserve is effectively a gas gauge for your watch. And if you watch while I'm winding the watch, how many times can I say, watch in one sentence. As you watch while I'm doing this, you'll see that this hand here, that's in this quarter moon gas gauge looking thing here, it goes up to 40, and as I'm winding it, you can see that that hand is moving. Well, what that's doing is it is recording how much power reserve the watch is going to have based on how many times I've wound it. And if now this is an automatic mechanical, there are other videos that can explain more detail about mechanical movements versus quartz movements versus automatic.

But I'm going to tell you that this is a mechanical watch. It's a jeweled movement. It does have actual mechanical parts in it, gears, wheels, so forth. It has a balanced spring, a balanced wheel, and a main spring. And it has a rotor that winds with the movement of your wrist. So if you wear this watch every day, you shouldn't ever, you should actually see it pretty close to that 40 mark on the fuel gauge or the power reserve all the time. But if you put it down for a, you know, it's going to, it's going to give you about 40 hours power reserve, put it down for the weekend, it's going to be gone by Monday. Or it's a great way to see, a lot of times if you're not somebody who leads an extraordinarily a busy lifestyle and you're moving your wrist a lot, sometimes like if you've got a desk job, you may not be actually giving the watch enough energy when you move around on your wrist.

That can happen. So having that having that gauge is a great way to notice whether you, you're giving the watch enough energy, because you definitely want to stay as close to fully wound as you can because the watch works better when it has a good solid wind on it. One of the other features of this watch, other than that amazing sunray dial on there and it just some of the standard stuff, it has a unidirectional rotating bezel and that is for a lapse time function for diving. It's again, the power reserve there is a sub, a 24 hour sub dial. Now that's slaved to the 12 hour. That's not an independent hand that you can set that's just showing you what the time is on the 24 hour scale. So those are some of the other features, but the stand, one of the stands, another standout feature of the Energia is the tritium tubes.

Now, if you're not familiar with tritium tube technology, what that is is that is the laser sealed glass tubes that are filled with a substance called tritium, which constantly activates the luminous material inside the glass tube so that you get constant illuminating illumination. That means that no matter what time of day you pick this up, what kind of lighting condition you're in, you're always going to be able to see the dial, and it's different than say Super Luminova, which you charge up in a light source, preferably UV, and then it's gonna fade over time. That doesn't happen here. You could throw this watch in a drawer for a year. You pull it back out. It's going to have the same luminosity. Now, one of the things I wanted to show you, let me be clear, this is a different dial than the watch we were looking at.

This is actually from one of the ones from the bronze collection of the Energia, but I wanted to get a close up here. One of the things that Vostok-Europe does really cool is maximizing the illumination they get out of their tritium tubes. In this particular example, they have these v shaped reflectors underneath each tritium tube and that means that the light is actually bouncing off of each side of that v-shaped reflector to give you a greater amount of luminosity as the, as the light emits from the dial. This is something that Vostok Europe created. It is their design and similarly to how they did the standup tritium tubes and the Lunokhod. That is the idea behind these reflectors is to maximize the luminosity. So you're getting the tritium tube technology, you're getting that amazing bracelet. I wanted to, while I had this particular model open, it was a unit that we decided to go ahead and open just to show you a few things about it.

I wanted to show you the case construction. Again, I'm showing you a bronze and not the stainless steel. If you look, look at how thick the case is outside of the internal area where the, where the movement has housed. Let's see how thick that is. Let's see how just how bad I can butcher doing this one. 5.9 millimeters thick. Think about how much metal that is, how strong this watch is because of the way the case is constructed. Another thing, and also you can see just how thick the case back is, the quality of construction on Vostok Europe is just unparalleled. I really think so. And then obviously as I show you the back, you can see that it is a metal movement holder when it comes to meeting the professional grade dive quality standards. Vostok Europe spares no expense.

They don't, they're gonna only put grade a quality materials. And I, it's important to see this because it helps you understand why this is $1,000 watch, you know, or in that neighborhood. because there is just so much thought put of design and styling such high quality in the materials. I mean, you just, and so when you see what all goes into a Vostok Europe, you realize that that's actually a bargain. Because watches that have this caliber of constructions, particularly Swiss, are gonna be multiple, multiple multiples of the price of this watch. This is 30 ATM. That means it's 10 ATM above progression. Professional grade time keeping. I am really struggling with my words today. So this just is absolutely at the just top level of quality. You're going to get a certificate that matches the limited edition on the watch that shows it past the limit, passed a water resistancy test before it left Vostok Europe.

And I forgot one of the piece d'resistance of this watch. So this is just going to be a long video guys. This case, this packaging, when you get the watch with the bracelet, you also get the leather strap that goes with it. This beautiful leather strap with the venting holes in it. It just looks so great and you get the silicon. Now remember it is a different system to put these on in the bracelet, so you're gonna have to keep up with those little round pieces that go in there. And then this amazing dive case, the dive case on this watch is just off the hook. They're made in the same facility that Pelican cases are made. They are thick water resistant. Listen to that close. I mean, wow. So, and it can be converted James Bond style cause these are, all of these things are hidden inside into a four watch holder.

So when you really think about all your games with this package here, that again, this package, you're getting 30 ATM, you're getting this amazingly heavy duty bracelet with some really great design touches. You're getting tritium tube technology, you're getting a big bold watch that's made amazing construction. You get this unbelievable dive case that can be altered in to hold four watches. There's so much here. I mean obviously I could even go on, and this has run longer than we usually do them when we can do a review. But because of the fact that we were really getting into the bracelet, that added some time to this. So that is the energy on the bracelet with the YN84 movement, which is just recently being used by Vostok Europe. And if again, if you like big, bold heavy watches, you are gonna love this. I'm Craig Hester with R2Awatches.com and hey, keep watching.