The caliber
A caliber with no secrets.
The Civis runs a PT5000 automatic. We did not choose it for being exotic but for the opposite: it follows an architecture that has been in production for over fifty years and that any watchmaker knows. This page tells where that design comes from, why more than one house can build it today and what that gets you.
The architecture
ETA introduced the caliber 2824 in 1971. The definitive version, the 2824-2, arrived in 1982 and is still in production: 25.6 mm across, 28,800 beats per hour, automatic and hand winding, hacking seconds and a date. It was not the thinnest movement, nor the most expensive. It was robust, accurate when well regulated and easy to service, and that made it the workhorse of Swiss watchmaking. Over five decades it has powered everything: daily watches, dive watches and dress watches.
The patent runs out
Industrial patents lapse after twenty years. The ones protecting the 2824-2 ran out around 2002, and with them the design passed into the public domain. Since then the recipe belongs to everyone: any manufacturer can produce that architecture, part by part, to the same measurements. What sets one caliber apart from another is no longer the blueprint, it is the execution.
The heirs
Sellita, which had spent decades assembling these movements for ETA, introduced its SW200 in 2003. In 2015, H.K. Precision Technology announced the PT5000, whose first units reached the market in 2017: same measurements, same frequency, 25 jewels and around 38 hours of power reserve. They are distinct calibers from distinct houses, built on the same plan. Wear parts are interchangeable and the behavior is known.
What that gets you
A design with fifty years of service has its failures catalogued and the fixes written down. Any watchmaker can open a PT5000, regulate it and source standard parts, without depending on us or on an in-house service department. And because real rate varies from one unit to the next, we do not settle for the catalogue figure: we measure your caliber's and note it in its report.
Well made, from unit one.
Every Civis is verified one by one: seven checks before it ships. The first units go out from October 2026.