It’s funny the way a brand can sneak up on you. Maybe you hear the name on a podcast, and then, a few months later, you run into the brand at a watch fair, or on a friend’s wrist. Still, despite repeated encounters, it’s remarkable how a brand can continue to exist entirely outside your awareness. Until it doesn’t. Until you somehow find a brand, or a watch, completely inescapable, unavoidable, inevitable. 18 months ago, I’m not sure I’d ever given an independent thought to Traska; today, that couldn’t be further from the truth, and the brand’s Chronograph (aptly named, the Chronograph) is the perfect example of why.
If you don’t yet know Traska, I don’t blame you. Traska is just one of many small brands that have popped up over the last decade, and they’ve broadly followed a familiar formula: Kickstarter launch, followed by a slowly expanding stable of somewhat conservatively designed, three-handed sports and dive watches, all powered by reliable but unassuming Japanese movements, and all drawing a heavy dose of inspiration from well-known (but far less accessible) watch brands.
So, if the broad strokes are familiar, where Traska has separated itself from the pack is in the details. For one thing, unlike so many other Kickstarter brands with similar stories who have come and gone with barely a whisper, Traska has stuck around and, each year, their watches have gotten better.
I finally reached my tipping point with Traska last year, when I picked up a second-hand Venturer GMT. When the watch showed up at my door, I was immediately impressed, but I can’t say I was smitten. That Rubicon was crossed later, when I found myself with an updated version of that same watch a few months later.
The then-latest version of the Venturer GMT, three or four generations removed from my first, was meaningfully improved, and my appreciation for the brand was cemented. A year on, that second watch — with its bottle green dial and orange-tipped GMT hand — has remained one of my most worn watches, and Traska has quickly become one of the easiest microbrands for me to recommend, both to newly minted enthusiasts and to longtime obsessives looking for something a little different.
All this is to say that Traska is now a brand I’m paying rapt attention to, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that when I first saw the Traska Chronograph on the wrist of Jon Mack, the brand’s founder, at Windup Watch Fair in New York last year, I was immediately intrigued. I’ve now spent the better part of half a year wearing the Traska Chronograph regularly, and I can comfortably say you should be intrigued, too.
Traska’s bread and butter over the last few years has been (to put it simply) an offering of solid, everyday sports watches designed to feel familiar. And there’s no getting around it — a lot of the watches borrow heavily from Rolex’s design language. Oyster-style cases and bracelets have been the default, and you might be forgiven for confusing the two brands from across the room (although, to be explicitly clear — Traska is absolutely not making anything that could be construed as a straight-up homage or fake).
But that surface-level critique belies a deeper truth, and that is that Traska is a brand punching way above its weight, making unbelievably tough, good-looking, functional watches which each come with interesting twists and evolutions that keep them from feeling anything like clones.
Which brings us to the Chronograph, Traska’s first entirely new model since the introduction of the Venturer GMT a few years ago. It’s a big step for the brand and possibly their most important watch so far (excepting one which has yet to be released), bringing it into a new price bracket, a new degree of complication, and marking its greatest aesthetic departure yet from the design language first established by the Freediver (the brand’s dive watch) in 2018, and gently iterated since then (if you’d like to get a sense of how the brand’s offerings have evolved, it’s worth a visit to their History page, which details the evolution of each model clearly).
The individual changes aren’t in and of themselves radical, but they will be apparent to anyone who’s spent an extended stretch with a recent Traska, and they compound on each other. Like all Traskas, the Chronograph feels contemporary, and it holds on to many of the details that have helped make Traska such a standout in the “GADA” watch category.
Here, that means the overall architecture of the watch is largely maintained. The hardened stainless steel case, three-link fully articulated oyster-style bracelet with single-sided screws and on-the-fly micro adjust, and lumed stick hands and indices are all still here; they’re just accompanied by a slew of added details and refinements, all of which befit a watch that comes with a noticeably steeper price tag than previous offerings from the brand.
Obviously, the biggest of these changes is the inclusion of a chronograph, a wholly new complication for Traska, but that change doesn’t come alone (nor is it the most significant indicator of changes coming from the brand moving forward). The 39mm wide, 13.75mm thick (with just-under 2mm domed sapphire crystal) case is accented by a slightly stepped case, with flat flanks replacing the convex flanks and chamfered accents of other watches in the lineup. It’s a small but meaningful change, one complemented by changes made to the bracelet.
Again, this is a case where subtle updates have led to what feels like a somewhat radical reinvention, all in the name of refinement. A wider, 21mm lug width and a more dramatic taper; chamfered edges on each link; and overall shorter, more rounded links change not only how the watch wears — the bracelet drapes just a bit more comfortably and conforms to the wrist just a little better — but also the watch’s presence. It’s not a stretch to say that the new bracelet (and the watch with it) commands more wrist presence than the more classically and restrained styling found on other Traskas.
The cumulative effect of all these changes, as well as the handsome new color palettes offered on the Chronograph, is a watch that comes with a decidedly different character and which communicates something of a step in a new direction for Traska. Oh, and these changes also mean the watch wears amazingly well. The size of this one is a bit of a magic trick. It has a ton of wrist presence for a relatively compact watch, feeling as perfectly sized on my 7.5″ wrist as it did on others when I forced a handful of my friends to try on the watch.
This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, because the lug-to-lug on this one comes in at a remarkably compact 45.7mm on my calipers (Traska cites the dimension as 46.5mm, but I couldn’t for the life of me replicate that number with any of three sets of calipers), which puts it squarely into the range of watches I feel comfortable recommending to just about anyone, dimensionally speaking.
Worth saying here is that one of the real selling points of Traska watches is the hardening treatment used across the range, which brings the hardness of the 316L steel used for the Traska cases to 1200HV on the Vickers Hardness scale (about the same hardness as Sinn gets with its Tegimented steel watches). The result is a watch that is, for all intents and purposes, scratch-proof. If you’re someone who really hates watch swirlies or scratches across the clasp of your watch, it’s certainly a feature to look for, and I can attest that, after six months of heavy wear, you could hardly tell that my own Traska has seen the outside of a watch box.
Of course, while all that is important, this watch is really all about the chronograph. As I mentioned, this is Traska’s first chronograph, and they’ve done a fantastic job executing. The place to start here is to address what I’m sure is the first question for many of you reading this: What movement is in this watch? Well, Traska has here opted to use Seiko’s NE86 chronograph movement, the two register version of the oft-used NE88 movement.
The NE86, which was first introduced by Seiko in 2021, is an automatic, vertical clutch, column-wheel chronograph movement with a date and 45-hour power reserve. It’s also 0.3mm thinner than the closest similarly-priced Swiss competitors. That may not sound like a lot, but chronographs can get thick fast, and 0.3mm of movement height can quickly compound in a fully cased watch. The stated accuracy of the NE86 movement isn’t earth-shattering, at -15/+25 seconds a day, but in practice, I found the example in the Chronograph on my wrist to be much more accurate than that.
As for the chronograph, the standout feature here is the bi-directional display itself, which offers a novel take on the concept of a subdial. Instead of traditional watch hands, the subdials are each made up of three elements: the subdial itself, in this case finished in a bright silver color and decorated with azurage (small, tight, concentric circles which emanate from the center of the subdial); a darker section of subdial that continues the azure pattern, but in a darker gray (black on the Arctic White) matching the rest of the dial and accented with a single red line (matching the red central chronograph hand); and a transparent disc that floats above the rest and substitute for traditional watch hands.
Each of the two transparent discs is printed with a scale of time. The right-hand sub-dial tracks 60 seconds and serves as the running seconds for the base timekeeping function of the watch, while the left-hand disc is marked to 30 and tracks the elapsed minutes for the chronograph. When you want to read one of the subdials, it’s a simple matter of reading the number floating above the red line printed underneath, something that’s remarkably easy to do because the white printing on the transparent discs largely blends into the silver backing of the subdial, making it easy to block out what you don’t need to see and focus just on the number you’re looking for. Admittedly, the new style of readout does take a little getting used to, but I made the adjustment quickly and, in the end, found it much more legible than many other chronographs.
Rounding out the functionality of the chronograph is a bezel in either a warm gray tungsten (on the Tungsten Gray model), or black ceramic (on the Arctic White). These bezels — the tungsten especially — which were each chosen for their durability and scratch resistance, are a nice differentiating touch for the watch and play host to a tachymeter, scaled from 50-200 units/hour. Typically, one might expect a racing chronograph’s tachymeter to start at 60 and reach around 400 or 500 units/hour, but Traska has opted to gear this one towards slower, more accessible speeds — the kinds you’re more likely to experience with a car than a rocket ship.
The chronograph itself is actuated by broad, squared-off, easy-to-find-and-use pushers flanking the screw-down crown. The modern shape of these pushers helps to distinguish the Traska Chronograph from the many more vintage-inspired chronographs available around this price (we’ll get there in a minute) and contributes to the watch’s feeling of solidity (as does the watch’s stated 75M water resistance).
That said, interacting with these pushers, while pleasant and crisp, does raise my one issue with this watch, and that’s a slight shudder in the running seconds disk when the chronograph is activated or stopped. It’s a small but noticeable niggle and a reminder that, for as good as this watch absolutely is, there’s no escaping that it does sit at the “budget” end of the mechanical chronograph world.
Which brings us back to price. The Traska Chronograph — in either Tungsten Gray or Arctic White — is priced at a very reasonable $1,650. Now, that’s a lot for a brand that has clearly established itself as a player in the sub-$1,000 range, but it’s also a downright bargain in the realm of mechanical chronographs, especially when you consider just how much watch you get for the money. Honestly, I have a hard time thinking of credible competition for this watch.
There’s the Baltic Scalegraph, which is undoubtedly a good watch. Depending on configuration, the Baltic comes in at around $1,900; and it’s probably its closest competitor in terms of quality and value, but I think it speaks to a different aesthetic in a way that makes them hard to cross-shop. And if Lorier (recently purchased by Worn & Wound) ever chooses to revive any of their chronograph models, they’d be immediately in the conversation as well.
Maybe the most direct competitor in my mind is the Timex Atelier Chronograph Automatic M1a Ti, which features a similarly contemporary aesthetic and bi-register layout, but which comes in at $2,100 on a strap (you pay an extra $150 for the matching bracelet). Beyond that, we can start to have conversations about brands like Oak & Oscar and their Atwood, which is one of my favorite mechanical chronographs from a small brand and features a flyback chronograph, but at that point you’re putting down serious money over and beyond the outlay required to get the Traska in hand.
Admittedly, each of those watches (with the exception of the Lorier) is easier to get ahold of than the Traska Chronograph, but I still think I’d try to find the patience to hold out for Traska to reopen order windows later this year. Because, in a world where value feels increasingly hard to come by, it’s a genuine pleasure to be able to point to a watch like the Traska Chronograph and feel confident in recommending it, not just at its price, but as a watch in its own right.
Read more here.