Worn & Wound
Yema Slims Down the Navygraf in a New Limited Edition
A micro-rotor dive watch? For under $2,000? At first blush, the concept may seem outrageous. After all, micro-rotor movements are typically reserved for high-end dress watches and complicated Indies. They’re hardly at home in the sort of accessible dive watches so many of us like, but Yema has - for the second time this year - dropped a svelte micro-rotor-powered dive watch, and they certainly have my attention. Yema is not a new name in the watch space. The brand has been around in some form or another since 1948 and, since its return to French ownership in 2008, the brand has been working hard to build itself into a leading French watchmaker. While they are best known today for their vintage-inspired dive watches like the Superman, over the last few years, Yema has slowly been building up a quiver of French-made manufacture movements produced in France’s own version of the Vallée de Joux, the watchmaking hub of Morteau. To date, they have introduced three movements in this series of French-designed calibers, with more surely to come. Though still reliant on Switzerland for regulating organs and some movement parts (not a bad thing on any level, even Roger Smith uses Swiss-made mainsprings), these movements have been a big step for the brand, and are far from being simple ETA or Sellita clones, like we so often see. The first of these was the CMM.20, a slim 3.7mm ultra-thin micro-rotor movement, with near-COSC accuracy, an anti-magnetic construction, a 70-hour po...
