Interview How Konstantin Chaykin's ThinKing Mystery, The World's Thinnest Watch, Went From Concept To Reality

In a world of serious watchmaking, Konstantin Chaykin has always been known for his mischievous take on horology, as seen in his Wristmons. With these wide-eyed Jokers, Chaykin put a grin on haute horlogerie, alongside releases with Mars-themed tech, clocks, and only rarely subdued designs. Besides adding a much-needed dose of humour to his wristwear, Chaykin is an AHCI member with more than a hundred patents, and someone who, in 2024, decided to step into the fierce race for thinness with competitors including Bulgari, Piaget and Richard Mille. The watch he unveiled was a 1.65mm-thick prototype called the ThinKing Mystery, and while the final version still holds the world record, and it does so with a watchmaker's vocabulary rather than a lab's, in a 40mm case you could still wear without a worry.

It is now entering production, limited to twelve pieces, so I wanted to catch up with Chaykin to understand what sparked his interest in the race for the world's thinnest watch. After all, this is an area almost nobody expected from Konstantin Chaykin, a watchmaker who’s best known for creating cheeky Wristmons and complex clocks.

Before getting to my conversation with Konstantin, let's look at the watch itself, which is now officially the world's thinnest at 1.65mm. It's a baffling measurement when most of us consider an 8–9mm watch to be svelte, and more so given that the ThinKing Mystery is beyond a prototype, entering series production with an added complication of the mysterious kind. The prototype, with twin dials and a futuristic regulator of sorts, sold for CHF 508,000 at Phillips, a price that represents relatively good value at less than a third of the previous record holder's retail price, the Richard Mille RM UP-01 at around USD $1.8 million. 

Unlike the architectural forms and credit-card rectangularity of its two main competitors, its silhouette is traditional, in the sense that it is a C-shaped 41mm case with lugs and a strap. That is where the similarities end. The thinness is remarkable, and all about high-level tech, yet the watch still offers Chaykin's classic look, with his logo as a nose and his name as a big grin. The twin hours-and-minutes dials from the prototype, with their compass-like star hands reminiscent of the Mille, have been replaced by two 10.6mm 'Mystery' dials in clear sapphire with printed hands. The term indicates a hidden mechanism and is as fascinating as the svelte shape, appearing on a flat, vertically brushed front panel.

With super-tight micron tolerances, the future-facing yet traditionally perlage-decorated K 23-3.1 movement uses the case back as its mainplate. The balance is laid on a single plane, driven by two wheels with toothed interlocking rims: the first governs the frequency and isochronism of oscillations, while the second acts as the impulse-jewel plate and interacts with the pallet fork. The production model adds a new feature, an uncovered barrel reinforced with stiffening ribs. Winding is done through the caseback-slash-mainplate, and the watch offers a 38-hour power reserve. The soft leather strap is made with titanium stiffeners and patented elastic inserts, and features a steel pin buckle, but without the strap, the watch alone weighs a sobering 12.1 grams.

"The story began during a conversation with a client, as I was presenting a project for a new ultra-complicated wristwatch," Konstantin Chaykin tells me. "He remarked that while the concept was impressive, there must be even greater challenges to pursue." Chaykin's client asked if he could create an ultra-thin watch, which, after some reflection, Chaykin agreed to. "It truly represented a profound and non-trivial technical challenge, and having always enjoyed testing my limits, I embraced this project with great pleasure."

Chaykin has said, as you would expect, that optimisation has touched almost every part of the movement, with the design carefully tweaked between prototypes. "To date, we have already created five generations of this watch," Chaykin recalls when I asked about the journey from sketch to production. "Generally, when you are solving such a complex problem, the ready answer doesn't just appear suddenly. Creating ultra-thin models is, above all, a work on integrated architecture. You cannot just take one single part and make it thinner; you have to proportionally reduce absolutely everything while maintaining the overall structural strength."

This is why Chaykin makes it clear that working on such a project is often carried out in two planes simultaneously. "On one hand, you always keep the final goal in mind, and on the other, you meticulously develop every individual node, inventing and working through several possible directions at once."

Embarking on a project of this magnitude is not a walk in the park, so I ask Chaykin about the challenges of working in such tight confines. "The thickness record achieved at the moment is not, in my view, the ultimate challenge. More than twenty years ago, I held a movement created in the 1850s, over 170 years ago, and its unprecedented thickness of just 1 millimetre proves a single point. If our friends from the 19th century could make such a thing, which also told the time, then this record can be repeated today in one way or another."

That antique calibre featured a cylinder escapement rather than the common lever escapement, and those who understand watch mechanics know a cylinder escapement is more difficult to execute and should take up more vertical space. "But no!" says Chaykin. "That watch was made, even if I don't exactly remember if it functioned at all, but it left a colossal impression. It was precisely what allowed me to confidently tell myself back then: this engineering problem can be solved."

As we all know, the path from centuries-old marvels to a fully functioning wristwatch that meets our expectations of accuracy and reliability poses a multitude of challenges. "Making a watch tick at a thickness of 1.65mm is one task. Making it so that you can confidently wear it on your wrist every day is a completely different one. What are we creating: a record-breaking object for exhibitions and safes, or a reliable instrument for indicating time? These are two fundamentally different approaches."

In that last distinction lay the biggest challenge of creating the ThinKing, which was conceptualising the watch without merely flattening all its components. "I set a different bar for myself," Chaykin told me, "to reinvent the architecture of the watch movement itself to make the ultra-thin construction truly durable."

Chaykin underlines that in any classic movement, two nodes take up the most vertical space: the balance assembly and the mainspring barrel. Working out how to make them thinner was therefore a prime task. "In the end, we found two fundamental solutions," says Chaykin. "The first is the double balance, for which I split the double roller between two separate elements, an idea I didn't arrive at right away, and the second solution concerned the barrel assembly. We created a flat barrel that effectively lacks walls and a conventional click wheel – the winding mechanism is integrated directly into the barrel arbour."

These small steps added up – or rather, reduced thickness – over time, set within a case made of an ultra-precision nickel alloy. "Traditional watchmaking metals like stainless steel, titanium, or gold were completely unsuitable for our task," Chaykin answers when I asked why. "Nothing conventional worked," he says with a smile. "Even tungsten, which is sometimes used in the watch industry, had to be excluded from the list of candidates due to its excessive brittleness at low thickness."

During his research, Chaykin found an alloy previously used in the Soviet space industry and re-engineered its thermal and mechanical treatment for the needs of the ThinKing. "This material is incredibly strong and not as brittle as a tungsten alloy, while remaining very geometrically stable at low thicknesses. However, the difficulty of machining it is colossal, which is why producing a single case takes a full two months. To complement it, I also designed a special strap construction that transfers part of the operational load away from the watch case onto itself."

Today, Chaykin and his team have moved from the final prototype to a production series of twelve, which made me wonder how many will be made this year, and whether any compromises were needed to make 1.65mm repeatable over time. "Of course, these are two entirely different tasks," Chaykin explains. "Making one unique watch or releasing a repeatable series is absolutely not a matter of compromises, which in our field immediately affects quality, and here it must be flawless."

To guarantee the result, Chaykin and his team had to completely restructure the atelier's production to allow complete recording of every single action in the process. "I already mentioned that making just the case alone takes two months," Chaykin reminds me. "This is an extremely complex routing that includes about 45 checkpoints and over 300 different operations! And after each step, there must be a quality check. That is number one. Secondly, the unprecedented thickness requires ultra-high precision, so many elements of the movement require individual adjustment, literally down to a micron. For example, the pivot diameter must perfectly match the hole in the jewel. For this, a special part-selection system was developed back at the manufacturing stage, and we built the entire production chain around it. This was a task of colossal complexity."

The third and equally important step is testing, for which the team created a special watch-checking program right at the first assembly stage. "Moreover," Chaykin adds, "we even adjusted the design of some parts to make them more reliable in production and more convenient to service, like ensuring the water resistance of the mechanism." For quality control, Chaykin implemented a whole cycle of final testing, so that every single one of these twelve pieces will fully meet each micron-precise requirement.

For me, as both a writer and a collector, a big plus is that the unmistakable DNA and 'face' of Chaykin's style is intact. Unlike some other ultra-thin watches, the ThinKing Mystery is perceived as a watch rather than a science experiment. "In all the ultra-thin models we have created – well, almost all of them – the spirit of the 'Wristmons' can still be unmistakably read on the dial," he says, telling me this was the goal from a design perspective. "For instance, in our latest watch, the Mystery, this approach became integrated. We simultaneously see a 'Wristmon' on the dial and transparent indicator eyes, which make a direct reference to our Levitas and Mystery watches created many years ago. And despite all this, the model remains a benchmark of thinness."

In Chaykin's mind, then, a round case is not so much an attempt to conform to the canons of the classics, but rather a desire to preserve the DNA of the 'Wristmons' he is known for. On the other hand, the very layout of the movement that allowed him to achieve extreme thinness inherently implies a 'regulator' configuration, with hours and minutes displayed apart. The big difference between the ThinKing and its competitors is that, despite its serious nature, it is done with a sense of frivolity and — for lack of a better word — fun. With a price specified as On Demand, we can only speculate, though each will surely be a prized part of any watch collection, and a record-breaking one at that.

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