In watchmaking, every material shows up in the final product. You see it in the way light moves across a dial, feel it in the weight of the case, and hear it in the click of a pusher. With our S5 chronograph, the materials arose from years of persistent trial and error, testing what works both technically and aesthetically.
The S5 is our flagship chronograph. It’s a maximalist piece meant to push every part of the design, movement, and materials as far as we could take them.
MING is a small independent brand. We design and develop everything in-house in Kuala Lumpur, then work with specialist partners in Switzerland and elsewhere to build watches in limited batches. The S5 is our flagship chronograph. It’s a maximalist piece meant to push every part of the design, movement, and materials as far as we could take them.
I’m not a trained watchmaker. My background is physics, finance, and photography. But eight years in this business has taught me one thing: you don’t survive by doing what everyone else is doing. Materials are part of that challenge. Over the years, we’ve worked with titanium, tantalum, magnesium alloy, and more. Each one changes how a watch looks, feels, and wears. The S5 is a distillation of that experience.
Inside the movement
A movement is mostly brass; it’s stable, easy to machine, and fine detail holds well. Steel takes on higher-wear jobs. Bearings are synthetic ruby, which are both hard and consistent.
Some parts need specialized alloys. The hairspring is Nivarox for temperature stability. The balance wheel is made from a similar alloy to hold its moment of inertia.
For the S5, we started with a complex chronograph from Agenhor and reworked it. We reshaped the bridges and refinished the surfaces. Earlier models had a gradient of DLC coatings across the layers. They’re small details, but they add depth.
Creating the case
Normally a watch case is built like a can: the movement sits inside a middle ring, the bezel goes on top, and the case back closes from the bottom. The S5 is different. Because I wanted integrated lugs with hollows, the case had to be split in an unconventional way. The movement sits inside a donut, the lugs attach from the sides, and the bezel and case back come in from the top and bottom.
The seams are hidden in 90-degree orthogonal divisions, so you don’t actually see where it comes together. Four pillars integrated with the bezel hold the whole thing in place, which means the watch uses about half the number of screws you’d normally need. In fact, it stays together without screws at all. They’re only there to lock it down at the end.
Weight and performance
Weight in a watch is a choice. You can make it much lighter than it looks, or much denser. That contrast between what you expect and what you feel makes an impression.
Tolerances are so tight that if one jewel in the escapement is off by 10 microns, the whole thing stops.
But it’s not just perception. A mechanical watch runs 24/7, beating three to five times a second. Tolerances are so tight that if one jewel in the escapement is off by 10 microns, the whole thing stops. Materials have to survive that workload, stay dimensionally stable, resist corrosion, and be safe against skin. Every alloy and coating is chosen because it can do that and still deliver the feel we want the moment you pick it up.
Move the slider back and forth to scrub through the S5.
Dialed-in
The S5 dial starts as a single billet of titanium. We laser and micro-machine it to create fins and facets, then apply a blue PVD coating. After that, it’s lasered again to bring out additional detail. The result is a layered surface that shifts depending on the light.
We knew we wanted contrast in the different finishes, colors, and textures to control how light hits the dial. Some of it is determined by what a material will accept. Titanium takes certain surface treatments that steel won’t. Sapphire, on the other hand, can be etched in layers. We prototype, assemble, and decide by eye.
Engineering white lume
Standard lume colors are fixed by the dopants in strontium aluminate: blue, green, yellow, orange, and pink. True white needs mixing across the spectrum, but each dopant has its own brightness and decay rate. The blend that looks white to the eye is uneven—heavily weighted toward some colors, reduced in others—and has to stay white as it fades. We kept adjusting until it worked. That’s how we achieved the S5’s Polar White lume.
What’s next
We have more than a hundred projects in the works. Some use metals never seen in watchmaking. Others involve multi-phase color-shifting coatings, seamless transitions between metal and sapphire, interference patterns, and animated effects. All of it is about how materials behave and how to make them do something new.
The S5 speaks in steel, titanium, sapphire, and light.
For me, materials are so much more than just the medium. They’re at the heart of watchmaking as a pursuit. The S5 speaks in steel, titanium, sapphire, and light. Every part of it is chosen for what it brings to that conversation.