still to be verified
In one line
The extra-flat hand-wound Peseux: 23.30 mm across, 2.50 mm tall, sub-seconds at six. ETA has stopped making it, and what is left on the market is old stock.
7001 against the D100: the handover
Stocks are running down and brands have spent years buying up what is left. In 2023 La Joux-Perret launched the D100: a 7001 to the same dimensions with a little more winding. Several brands have already made the switch without touching the case.
| ETA/Peseux 7001 | La Joux-Perret D100 | |
|---|---|---|
| Diameter | 23.30 mm | 23.30 mm |
| Height | 2.50 mm | 2.50 mm |
| Frequency | 21,600 vph | 21,600 vph |
| Power reserve | 42 hours | 50 hours |
| In production | No | Yes, since 2023 |
| What you buy today | Old stock | A new movement |
The dimensions matching to a tenth of a millimetre is no accident: the D100 is built to drop into cases drawn around a 7001, with nothing redesigned. It also uses a different click and gives eight hours more power reserve.
On a second-hand watch it makes no difference which one you have. On a new watch sold as a '2.5 mm Swiss hand-wound movement', ask which of the two is inside.
Where it comes from
Peseux is a village in Neuchâtel and it was also an ébauche factory. Charles Berner founded it in 1923 and it specialised in one thing: flat calibres. It joined Ebauches SA in 1933 — the conglomerate that ETA would eventually emerge from — yet it went on signing movements with its own name for almost half a century, which was rare inside that group.
The 7001 arrived in 1971 and has not changed since. Ten and a half lignes, two and a half millimetres tall, sub-seconds at six. Peseux ceased to exist as a legal entity in 1979 and production moved to Fontainemelon, but the calibre carried on, now with ETA in front of the number. Somewhere north of two million are thought to have been made.
Its career was made by its height. An automatic needs a rotor on top and that costs millimetres; with a 2.50 mm hand-wound calibre you can build a dress watch under nine millimetres thick without inventing anything. Longines renamed it the L396.2, Omega used it in the hand-wound De Ville as the calibre 651, and Nomos built its entire first decade on it.
Three things almost nobody knows
- Nomos started with this calibre and kept its layout. From 1991 to 2005 the Tangente, Orion, Ludwig and Tetra all had a 7001 inside. When Nomos built its own Alpha calibre in 2005, it kept the architecture of the 7001 and changed the parts. That is not copying, but it is not starting from nothing either.
- The same ébauche sells at €990 and at €83,000. The 36 mm Baltic Prismic runs a 7001. So does the Ludovic Ballouard Upside Down. Between the two sit eighty-two thousand euros of case, finishing and workshop time, and exactly the same engine underneath.
- The hand-wound Omega De Ville is a Peseux. The Omega calibre 651, fitted to De Ville models from the 1990s on, is this movement: 23.30 mm, 2.50 mm, 17 jewels, 21,600 vph, 42 hours. Every figure lines up. Omega never hid it, but it never put it in the window either.
Technical data
| Type | Hand-wound, extra-flat |
|---|---|
| Origin | Fabrique d'ébauches de Peseux (Neuchâtel) |
| Diameter | 23.30 mm (10½ lignes) |
| Height | 2.50 mm |
| Jewels | 17 |
| Frequency | 21,600 vph (3 Hz) |
| Power reserve | 42 hours |
| Seconds | Sub-seconds at six |
| Shock protection | Incabloc |
| Production | From 1971 · discontinued; successor: La Joux-Perret D100 |
What a watchmaker checks before buying one
A hand-wound movement two and a half millimetres deep forgives less than a thick one, and the winding is where you notice first. At the end of the wind the mainspring should stop dead. If the crown keeps turning against a soft resistance with no clear finish, either the winding pinion is chewed or the stem has been forced. Neither part can be ordered from a catalogue any more.
Next, the rate in the vertical positions. Thin mainplates distort under a knock or an over-tightened casing clamp screw, and a warped mainplate is invisible to the eye. What you see instead is a watch that keeps good time lying flat on the bedside table and poor time on the wrist.
Then the oil. No calibre turns up more often inside a watch that has spent twenty years in a drawer and 'runs perfectly'. It runs dry, which is a different thing. A 7001 that has not been serviced since the 1990s is grinding away its own pivots while it tells the time.
On spares, the right question is no longer whether the watchmaker knows the movement. It is whether they can get the parts. Ask about the balance and the mainspring in particular: those are the two that have become hard to find.
Watches that used it
- Nomos Tangente, Orion, Ludwig and Tetra — 1991-2005
- Omega De Ville, hand-wound — calibre 651
- Longines — calibre L396.2
- Baltic Prismic — 36 mm
- Louis Erard Excellence Regulator — 40 mm
- Furlan Marri Disco Volante — 38 mm
- Ludovic Ballouard Upside Down — 41 mm