A quarter repeater is a watch that chimes the time to the nearest fifteen minutes on demand. It was never a common complication, and by the late 1950s it was close to extinct, made obsolete by the electric light that meant nobody needed to hear the time in the dark any more. Which is exactly when Angelus built the Tinkler, in 1958, as an automatic and water-resistant quarter repeater, two things a chiming watch was not supposed to be. Only around 100 reached the market. Angelus has now brought it back as part of its heritage-focused La Fabrique line, in two metals.
The complication hides in a plain watch
The point of the Tinkler, then and now, is that it does not look like a complicated watch. The case is 38mm across and 12.03mm thick, polished, with a domed box sapphire crystal that copies the shape of a 1950s acrylic. The dial is a domed, sunburst white, carrying golden faceted markers, a prominent Arabic 12 and the distinctive exclamation-shaped indices at three, six and nine that were on the original. It says ANGELUS TINKLER and AUTOMATIC and nothing else. You would not know it chimes.
The one visible tell is a pusher set into the left flank of the case. Press it and a gong strikes the hours with a single note, then a second gong adds a double strike for each elapsed quarter. It is a mechanical read-out of the time in sound, and the reason the complication survives at all is that people like it, not that they need it. Water resistance is 30 metres, and the screw-down caseback carries the Angelus "A" monogram over the numbered edition.
Calibre A600, a new automatic under an old idea
Where the 1958 watch had a period automatic, the 2026 Tinkler runs a new movement, the Calibre A600. It is a self-winding calibre measuring 28mm by 7.35mm, with 33 jewels, beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour and holding a 70-hour reserve. The finishing is the part that justifies the price: snailing, Côtes de Genève with polished bevels, blued screws with mirror-polished heads and a sunburst tungsten rotor. The chime is added on top of a straightforward time-only base, hours, minutes and seconds, with the quarter repeater on demand.
Two metals, forty watches
The Tinkler comes in stainless steel, limited to 25 pieces, on a saddle brown alligator strap with a steel pin buckle, at CHF 37,900. The 18k yellow gold version, limited to 15 pieces, comes on an ink-blue alligator strap with a gold buckle, at CHF 56,300. Both prices include tax. The references are 0TKAS.W01A.C1468S for the steel and 0TKAQ.W01A.C1470Q for the gold.
Forty watches is a small run, and a chiming watch at under CHF 40,000 in steel is a genuinely unusual thing, since the complication almost always arrives attached to a much larger bill. The Tinkler will not chime the minutes the way a full minute repeater does, only the quarters, but that is the whole conceit: a modest, heritage-correct version of a complication that is usually anything but modest. More detail is at angelus-watches.com.
