Hands-On Alpina’s Old Dog Of A Movement Has Plenty Of New Tricks

I am (relatively) famously a fan of antiquated and anachronistic watches. I've tried to fight the moniker of "the pocket watch guy" but it's who I am. That's why I'm a fan – both in theory and in practice – of Alpina's newest limited edition Startimer Pilot Heritage Manufacture, an attractive pilot's watch that brings back an old and now-relatively unnecessary style of movement: the bumper.

A lot of watches that I dream of owning come with a bit of anachronistic flair. The Universal Space Compax. The Porsche Design Compass Watch. The Audemars Piguet "Disco Volante." They're all little time capsules of their era.

See, for all the improvements in water resistance, service intervals, durability, finishing, power reserve, and every bit of random technology brands can cram into their new releases, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that watchmaking didn't just get it at least close to perfect way back in 1938 with the Valjoux 72. Column wheel chronograph, 6.95mm thick, and used by everyone from Breguet and Franck Muller to Rolex and Gallet.

Maybe a movement like that didn't need much improvement but watchmakers never rest on their laurels. What often lies in their wake, however, are designs that nearly crack the code on something big but in the end, are relegated to a footnote in watchmaking history. Maybe the best example? The bumper movement – the automatic movement that for a short time was "good enough," until it wasn't. But with its new Startimer Pilot Heritage Manufacture, Alpina is making the case that good enough can still be great. First, a little history lesson.

In 1777, decades before wristwatches were even a twinkle in Abraham-Louis Breguet's eye, the Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Perrelet invented a self-winding mechanism, putting an oscillating weight in a pocket watch. Walk for 15 minutes, he said, and your watch would be wound for eight days (apparently he lived a very sedentary lifestyle). Breguet himself made his own version of the automatic winding (perpétuelle, he called it) in the 1780s but it never quite took off.

In the 1920s, however, British watchmaker John Harwood seemed to have a breakthrough when he created a new "bumper" mechanism that – in addition to protecting a watch from dust or water ingress through the crown – allowed the watch to be wound through the wearer's movement moving an oscillating weight inside.

Sounds like today's automatic watch, right? Well, unlike today's watches that have a rotor that spins 360º the old bumper movements got their name from the fact that the weight only rotated about 120º before "bumping" off a spring inside the track of the weight, bouncing around the other direction, and hitting another spring.

By the 1940s, you could find bumper movements in watches like Jaeger-LeCoultre, Omega, Mido, and yes, Alpina. And just as quick as they took off, bumper movements were gone. By the late 1950s, Omega and Jaeger-LeCoultre had moved to better, more affordable automatic movement designs.

That's part of what makes Alpina's recent revival of the bumper so fun. As its sixth in-house caliber – the AL-709 – it's kind of a surprise that a sporty brand seems to have brought back a "dead" design for nothing more than nostalgia's sake. And frankly, I'm here for it. That's not to say Alpina slapped an old movement design in a new case and called it a day. No, it seems acutely aware of the "bumper's" drawbacks and made efforts to improve it.

After all, improvement is a core part of Alpina's ethos back to its founding. Back in 1938, Alpina set down four key fundamentals to improve its sport watches: antishock, antimagnetic, water-resistant, and stainless steel. That set it on a path to today's brand that features a touch of heritage in its design on the whole, with a very sporty and outdoorsy package.

That makes the AL-709 bumper movement stand out even more – a throwback for a brand that seems to set eyes toward the future. The new bumper's weight rotated 330º around the center, imparting more power and efficiency to the winding of the movement which has a 38-hour power reserve. The difference between old and new are apparent through the exhibition caseback.

Instead of the edges of the weight bumping against springs that sent it back and forth, the weight now only has a small lip, a few millimeters wide, along the track that does the "bumping". Then there's the "bumper" itself, where Alpina has removed the springs that gave the weight its bounce and just left a hard piece of metal, again taking up less rotational space.

The movement was first released in 2021 in the predecessor to this watch another Startimer Pilot with the same case shape but a very retro "'50s" look with a white dial and red accents. Honestly, if I even heard about the watch when it first came out I probably overlooked it because of the candy cane-esque dial color. Which is a shame. I'm sure I would have at the very least appreciated bumper movement if I had given it a second look.

Alpina's recent release of its newest Startimer Pilot Heritage Manufacture, today's blue-dialed watch, was the first chance I had to see bumper movement in person and boy was I excited. But while I love the effort and the aesthetic as a whole, at first, I wasn't sure how I felt about the changes.

After all, the point of the bumper movement is the "bump." Instead of a nice soft and satisfying bounce of the weight, you get a hard jolt, which you can feel and hear on the wrist. At first, it can feel like there's something wrong – how many watches do you wear where a knocking sound lets you know that everything working perfectly? In some ways, it feels like a fully-rotating automatic movement that was arbitrarily stopped from going all the way around. I also wonder about the longevity of the shock of the bumper against the pillar, though I'm not a watchmaker.

More than anything, my sentimentality kept me looking at the watch. Looking at an old bumper movement and seeing springs feels so ruggedly industrial in a romantic, "it doesn't have to look perfect it just has to work" sort of way. Here, everything is clean and decently finished, sure, but maybe a little antiseptic. But in the end, I'm left to believe the watchmakers at Alpina know best.

What won me over was the new dial design feels more rugged, sporty, and casual than 2021's white dial release. The new blue dial skews black in photos, with applied polished Arabic numerals, and patinated lumed hour markers on the outside railroad track, and has enough details to keep you coming back for a second or third look. There's also no mistaking this for anything but a field-meets-pilot watch, a fact that somehow assuages any concerns about the banging bumper movement. In fact, as time went on, I started to get the sense that the knocking of the movement was the watch saying "I'm alive. Beat me up. I can take it."

The 1950s-inspired but modern-sized 41mm steel cushion case remains the same as the past release. Its rugged and angular shape is highlighted even more by the mix of mirror-polished sides and radially-polished top, with the crown at four o'clock. It also wears pretty comfortably despite its larger size. The cushion case dimensions belie a shorter lug-to-lug than the width – 40.75 mm – and those integrated lugs keep the watch down tighter to the wrist on a ruggedly-finished strap with contrast stitch fits the pilot's watch-meets-field watch styling with 100m water-resistance – more than you'd probably ever put to use.

As I packed the watch up to send to Alpina, I thought about what drew me in, in the first place. I loved the idea of the bumper movement, and for all my early griping, I thought about my love of old design.

A brand bringing back an old dog with new tricks? Sign me up. In the end, my only real complaint is that Alpina only made 188 watches for this release and it already appears to be sold out. Seems like I wasn't the only one that loves anachronisms. But for $3,195, the Startimer Pilot Heritage Manufacture watch isn't a one-trick pony based on movement alone, it's a whole package I hope some of you were able to get your hands on.