MB&F Horological Machine Guide: HM1 to HM12 Specs, History, Prices | Ultimate Watch

The Friends in Maximilian Busser & Friends are real, named people, and collectors track them the way art buyers track studios: Eric Giroud spent hundreds of hours translating Busser's HM1 sketches into 3D; Peter Speake-Marin and Laurent Besse made the four-barrel engine actually run; Jean-Marc Wiederrecht flipped a Girard-Perregaux caliber upside down for HM3; David Candaux gave HM6 a tourbillon shield that opens and closes like an eyelid. The battle-axe rotor, first seen in 22k gold on HM3, became the brand's unofficial signature and reappears in platinum 950 on HM6. The MoonMachine collaboration put Stepan Sarpaneva's signature moon faces into HM3, an early example of the Performance Art pieces where an outside creator reworks an existing Machine. HM4 nearly broke the young company: 311 movement components and 65 case parts pushed its build cost so high that only around 100 were ever finished, and Busser has called it the purest expression of what MB&F exists to do. The HMX at $30,000 was a deliberate thank-you to collectors priced out of the main line. And HM12 revives the brand's robot obsession: the watch undocks from its strap and clicks onto the head of a 38.2cm L'Epee automaton holding a loupe, a UV torch, and a thermometer, 755 components of mechanical bodyguard. Nobody needs any of this, which is precisely the point, and precisely why the small editions keep selling out before they reach a display case.