The fickle hands of time
The watch is very high quality and the Emerald Night version is also very beautiful. I’m experiencing 2-3 seconds/day—amazing for a mechanical watch. While this 40mm watch wears more comfortably than my 43-44 mm diameter watches, in darkness this also means it’s more difficult for my 63 year-old eyes to read the hands. Of course, that’s my issue, rather than the watch’s problem per se. The big disappointment for me was the hour and minute hands. The good news is they’ve been treated with Superluminova C3 X1. The bad news is that—apparently the consequence of a misguided (in my opinion) effort at aesthetics—only about 50% of their surface receive the luminous application. This unfortunate feature significantly degrades nighttime legibility—especially for "older" eyes. Moreover, the 50% of the hands’ surface area without Superluminova is unpainted and thus highly reflective—resulting in a "dazzle" effect which reduces daytime legibility—even for young eyes. This could have been my "go to" watch, but for those unfortunate hands. From my perspective, a "real" watch is necessarily designed to easily render the time at a glance under all conditions. Because hey, I want an eminently practical watch, rather than a showy bracelet that also displays time as a secondary consideration. The Ironclad ALMOST met my expectations. Maybe it’s possible (although perhaps not practicable) to replace these hands with some that are actually designed for easy legibility under all conditions. Then I’d be happy to award the Ironclad with the 5 stars I feel it otherwise merits. A good effort by Axios and an adequate watch for some, but I hope in future offerings they never sacrifice a single iota (whatever an "iota?" may be) of performance for aesthetics. I realize not everyone wants exactly the same from their watch, and a designer is never going to successfully make everyone fully satisfied.