Dijkman Watches

Dijkman Watches is the independent watchmaking practice of Holke Dijkman, a Dutch craftsman whose career spans more than four decades of precision mechanical work across the military, toolmaking, clockmaking, and watchmaking. Dijkman trained at the Horlogemakers Vocational School in Hoorn, the Netherlands, before his military service — where he served as an optical and mechanical instrumentator, working on the viewing and targeting devices of tanks and armored vehicles, an experience that sharpened his understanding of precision mechanical systems under exacting tolerances. In 1992 he joined W. Prins Matrijzen and Models as a toolmaker, gaining hands-on expertise in milling, grinding, EDM spark erosion, and manual finishing and polishing. The decisive turn came in 2001, when he began a decade-long collaboration with Christiaan van der Klaauw Astronomical Watches — one of the Netherlands' most internationally respected independent watchmakers — where he was responsible for calculating gear trains and producing prototypes for the firm's astronomical complications, making a significant contribution to the technical development that helped bring Van der Klaauw its international standing. A further three-year period followed at Van der Gang Watches in Dokkum, where he combined repair and service work with assembling new timepieces.

Dijkman's own work reflects the full breadth of that background. He has built a series of handmade precision regulators — including the 40-day Regulator 'Classic', with an Invar pendulum rod, compensation spring, and 18-carat gold-plated dial with separately indicated hours, minutes, and seconds in a hand-built wooden cabinet; and the 15-day Regulator 'New York', weight-driven with an exposed open movement and a floating middle plate visible through a glass cabinet. His wristwatch debut is the Versum (Latin for 'reversed'), a 42mm hand-wound wristwatch built on a modified Unitas UT 6497 base, in which the movement is inverted — turned face-down inside the case — so the architecture of the going train, bridges, and plates is fully visible from the dial side, with the hands driven in the correct direction via a proprietary reversing system of Dijkman's own design. The effect is that the hands appear to float above the mechanism rather than sit in front of a conventional dial. Gilded and rhodium-plated components create contrasting depth in the movement view. The Versum won the Aurochronos Festival 2017, the Dutch independent watchmaking competition.

The Versum's engineering deserves a closer look, because inverting a movement is harder than it sounds: display the time from the 'wrong' side and the hands run counter-clockwise unless corrected. Dijkman's solution adds fourteen entirely hand-made gears to the Unitas base — ten to redirect the hours and minutes so they read correctly, four replacing factory wheels — with the drive routed around the movement via a visibly rotating ball-bearing ring and a raised, rail-track-style minute disk, leaving the hollowed centre open to the running gear and balance. The project began around 2013, built in Dijkman's spare time, and is capped at 250 pieces — though the real limit is one man's production capacity; early watches went to clients he stays in personal contact with, gathering feedback on accuracy and reliability. Silver or champagne dial finishes, a choice of lacquered hand colours, and two 42 mm case variations (one with straighter soldered-style lugs, one more rounded) keep each example individual, and every watch ships on a padded leather strap in a handmade wooden box, now with international distribution through an authorised dealer in the United States and a two-year warranty. His résumé also hides one more gem: a table watch created together with Christiaan van der Klaauw — Dijkman responsible for the technical design, production, and finishing — that pairs the time with a heliocentric planetarium of Mercury through Saturn beneath a glass bar, mounted in steel and granite. It is a fitting summary of the man: a toolmaker-turned-watchmaker who spent a career making other people's complications possible, and finally built one that could only be his own.