We always like to tell people that the watches made by Devon are what you get when you let an American design a watch –not a watch rooted in European tradition, not a watch that looks back to the Golden Age of American watchmaking, not a watch that casts a misty eye, through rose colored glasses, at bygone days, but a watch that represents all the size, brashness, and helpless love of over-built ingenuity that characterizes American engineering at its best.

If that’s what you like, have we got (or rather, has Devon got) a watch for you.

The Devon Tread 1 Exoskeleton manages to do what we really didn’t think any watch could: out Oh-My-Freakin’-God the Devon Tread 1. Oh, it’s not just the size (although it’s not a small watch, God knows, sharing the 56mmx50mm dimensions of the original Tread 1) or the complexity (though again, it’s got the same Time-Belt system, inductive wireless charging mechanism, and delightfully audible whirring and clanking, Mechagodzilla-esque sound effects of the original, at least when you have Silent Mode turned off, and we’d pretty much always have silent mode turned off if we were wearing a Devon.)

The kicker here is that the watch is made to be as transparent as possible –we suppose you could call it a skeletonized watch, although that doesn’t even begin to capture what’s going on visually with the Exoskeleton. Most every major external component of the watch case is now made of tough polycarbonate –this is a thermoplastic (yeah, plastic, get over yourself) that’s used in bulletproof glass and is also used for the canopy of the F-22 Raptor, and if it’s good enough for the finest over-engineered, needlessly complex, ridiculously expensive air superiority fighter in the world, it’s good enough for you, my friend.

Devon’s created an exoskeleton –a cage of what it euphemistically refers to as “armor-plating” –to support the polycarbonate panes that make up the case, and they’ve gone one step further and altered the architecture of the drive motor housings as well as given the Time Belts a transparency treatment to make the whole thing as see-through as possible. We had this kaiju of a watch on our wrists in BaselWorld and if Hollywood could make a summer movie as much sheer fun to wear as the Tread 1 Exoskeleton it’d be worth a hundred X-Men franchises. Let’s see: electromechanical, power-hogging, bulletproof, see-through, and probably with a carbon footprint like a hundred Shelby Cobras all burning rubber at a red light at once. YES. GO DEVON. FOR AMERICA.

The Devon Tread 1 Exoskeleton is 56mmx50mmx18.5mm.   Construction, high impact polycarbonate and 316L stainless steel and “armor plating” and Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Inductive wireless charging system capable of browning out Manhattan or wherever.  Bring civilization to its knees and look the beast in the eye here.