Once an American brand known for railroad timing, the Ball Watch Company’s products are now Swiss-made and have a heavy focus on inclusion of tritium illumination. In this case, small tubes are filled with a tiny amount of gas that is actually radioactive (though totally harmless in these amounts) and glows perpetually with no need of charging from an external light source, as modern luminescent material commonly used on watches does. The new Ball Roadmaster StarLight watches, now available for preorder at a special price, feature more tritium tubes than ever.
Whereas previous Roadmaster watches from the brand used stick-shaped indices, the new StarLight version has Arabic numerals fully filled out in gloriously glowing tritium. They also illuminate the hands and the bezel’s pip, and the remainder of the aluminum bezel insert markings are in Super-LumiNova.
With dial and bezel colors available in various combinations of black, blue, or green, Ball is actually offering a range of options for the Roadmaster StarLight. The Roadmaster case is stainless steel with a water-resistance of 200m, and comes in 40mm or 43mm-wide versions. Inside is a Swiss ETA 2836-2 automatic movement with 38 hours of power reserve which, in addition to displaying the standard time and date, also displays the day of the week. Further, customers can opt for COSC chronometer-certified versions, as well as specify their desired limited-edition number out of 1,000.
Pre-order is open now until April 17, 2019, with prices starting at $1,399 for non-COSC models and going up to $1,749 for the COSC versions, regardless of case size. When pre-order is over, the Ball Roadmaster StarLight will be available in September 2019 at retail prices of $1,849 and $2,299, respectively. Each version will be limited to 1,000 pieces.