My IWC Pilot Worldtimer - Ref 3262

I browse the IWC forum occasionally, but I've never posted before. However recently I've seen a couple of posts lamenting the lack of Worldtimers that have been discussed here, so I thought I would join and share mine.
[](s175.photobucket.com/user/TwistyRoads/media/Worldtimer.jpeg.html)

I bought it in June 2012, six months after it was introduced at SIHH 2012. Since then it has been my daily watch about 75% of the time. My job is international, so I communicate with my team in various geographies on a daily basis as well as travel quite extensively. So for me, this is a "tool" watch, and it works beautifully. Throughout my workday, I'll need to know what time it is in various time zones around the world and whether it is too early or too late to contact my team or my customers. That makes my Worldtimer much more useful to me than a GMT or UTC watch. I've done a lot of comparing other brand world time watches, and I think the IWC Worldtimer has the best combination of features:

• Highly legible face, great contrast
• Hour jump adjustment. This is a must have if you travel between different time zones frequently.
• City ring does not rotate. I prefer this over city rings that can rotate, because I want my eyes trained to always look in the same place for Paris or Sydney, for example.
• Hands correctly proportioned to inner main dial, leaving the 24 hour and city ring unobstructed.
• Ramped city ring, adding depth and legibility. And the city ring is on the outside of the 24 hour ring, which gives more room where it's needed...for the city names.
• City ring includes DST adjustments
• 24 hour ring includes day/night indicator, is very legible, and has all 24 numbers (not just even numbers)
• Lume on hands and 3,6,9,12
• Date
• IW326201 movement is based upon an ETA movement which I understand IWC basically tears down and reassembles to their standards, and adds an in-house world time complication.

I'm very happy with this watch!
TwistyRoads

Hello TwistyRoads,

Thank you very much for showing your watch, and for describing your experience with it. Your pointers are so true in my eyes. I bought the watch yesterday, and I am very happy with it, the first day wrist experience was awesome. After about two years of ignoring this Worldtimer it suddenly dawned upon me how interesting and useful, and great fun it is: such a switch in opinion and appreciation hardly ever occured to me, it makes me humble and weary about opinions. Seeing it on my wrist shocked me in that it looks much nicer than any picture can show. I will make some more pictures of it during the weekend, just for the fun of it, as it only is second best behind seeing it on your own wrist.

Kind regards,
Paul

Very nice mate. Good to see another one on here. At some point in the not to distant future I hope to pick one up as well. I agree, it is a very interesting/useful piece. And I think it looks great as well.

Cheers

Jarrod

My only complaint is no Auckland on the dial!! IWC are you listening? :-)

Welcome TwistyRoads and congratulations on being an owner of the Worldtimer, and thanks for the photo. Thanks also for describing the benefits so succinctly. This will be a great help for others who may be considering this watch purchase.

Welcome TwistyRoads, to this great Forum!

Thanks for sharing your impressions on the Worldtimer, it's a very interesting piece.

Welcome Sir, and a great opening post. Very good arguments and analysis of a useful watch!

Thank you for the nice comments. Maybe you'll tolerate a little more Worldtimer love...
Since I've been traveling regularly with my Worldtimer for the past 18 months, I have made some observations that were not obvious to me when I first bought it:

• This watch functions as it’s own “reference” when changing time zones. When you land in a new time zone after a long flight, the flight attendant usually says “Welcome to Zurich, the local time is 3:45.”… and then everyone sets their watch to 3:45. With my Worldtimer, I don’t have to wait for the flight attendant announcement… I’ve known what time it is in Zurich during the whole flight, and can adjust my watch whenever I want. Of course, any world time watch will do this…it just hadn’t occurred to me until I took this watch on the road.

• The jumping hour hand adjustment feature is handier than I originally thought it would be. Bear with me and I’ll explain. One of my most frequent flights is across 9 time zones. Let’s say I’m wearing a watch that does NOT have hour jump, and I want to adjust my watch to the new time zone while I’m in the air. I would first read the current time, let’s say 7:16pm, and then mentally add 9 hours (and probably counting on my fingers :)), to reach 4:16am. Then I would stop the watch and spin the minute hand around to advance the hour, which probably takes a minute or 2. By the time I get the watch to 4:16, it’s not really 4:16 anymore; it’s probably 4:18 or 4:20. I like my watch to be fairly accurate, so now that I’ve got it close to the time at destination, I’ll use my phone to to synch exact minutes and seconds. That’s a pain. However, WITH the hour jump feature on the Worldtimer: pull out the crown, advance the hour nine clicks, push in the crown. I don’t need to know the time, I don’t need to do any math, and the watch doesn’t stop so it doesn’t need to be re-synchronized. I just count nine clicks. Simple! I realize that other watches also have the hour jump feature… but not all world time watches have it.

• A Worldtimer should see the world, right? I’ve taken this watch to 11 of the 24 cities listed on the watch. Now before Jarrod points out that there are only 23 cities because IWC used “Date Line” instead of Auckland like they should have :), remember the watch also says Schaffhausen in the middle of the dial. And yes, I’ve taken the watch back to Schaffhausen, even back inside the Complications Workshop at IWC to be reunited with its maker during a tour! So the “visit all the cities on my watch” game is kind of entertaining…

TwistyRoads

But.... it should have AUCKLAND on the dial!!!!! :-).

Won't stop me picking one up. It's nice to see it getting some love on here. It is well deserved. Hopefully won't be too far in the future when I grab one.

Cheers,

Jarrod

twistyroads,

very interesting observations, and very pleased to hear you're really enjoying your worldtimer!

thanks for sharing,
thang

Interesting and insightful comments. I've looked at Nomos and JLC but the Worldtimer is more my speed. This is only reinforcing.

Ktowngreg, thanks for the comments.
JLC makes a couple of different world timers, which I like as well. I especially like the Master Compressor with alarm, which I have fondled many times but do not own. I think the alarm complication is a nice addition to a world timer, aligned with the "travel tool" purpose of the watch.

I think the NOMOS Zurich is a very nice looking watch, but beware...it is not really a world time watch...it only displays two time zones at a time. It does have a cool "click to advance" feature to adjust the second time zone, maybe making it easier (or at least cooler :)) to adjust than a normal GMT or Dual Time watch.

TwistyRoads