MB&F - HM3 Frog X - 10th anniversary - front rotor, hours & minutes on spinning domes - sapphire case - limited edition 10โ€™pieces - retail price : 152,000โ‚ฌ excluding VAT Now, 10 years after its debut, HM3 Frog makes its comeback, radiantly exposed in a sapphire crystal case, yet still with a hidden message to be discovered. Presenting Horological Machine Nยฐ3 โ€œFrog X.โ€

For the first time, the HM3 engine is showcased in all its glory, used here in its MegaWind iteration that trades the date display for an expanded rotor. Two paper-thin domes, milled out of aluminum to be as light as possible, indicate the hours and minutes, rotating under markers designed to resemble the lateral pupils of a frogโ€™s eyes. Super-LumiNova accents, like the vivid colors that nature endows upon its feistiest creatures, reveal themselves in fluorescing segments under the rotor and on the time-display domes.

If the first HM3 Frog was an animal of land and lake, Frog X brings us into the arboreal realms of the transparent-skinned glass frogs of Central American cloud forests. The transparent case of Frog X is made entirely of sapphire crystal, one of the hardest known minerals, and must be milled with diamond-tipped tools or special high-tech carbide bits. Despite MB&Fโ€™s experience with the most advanced sapphire-crystal producers (as demonstrated in earlier MB&F creations such as the HM4 Thunderbolt and HM6 Alien Nation), machining the case of HM3 Frog X still provides a considerable challenge. The separate sapphire domes not only need to be uniform in size, they must also be exactly uniform and consistent in thickness and curve so as not to create any final optical distortions in the reading of the time.