Eighteen years after the first one, F.P. Journe built the Vagabondage again. This is the 6N gold execution, a limited series of sixty-eight pieces produced in 2022, in a Flat Tortue case measuring 45.2 by 37.5 mm and standing 7.6 mm deep. The display is the same wandering hours arrangement the model has always used: an hour numeral appears in a mobile window, and the position of that window against the outer track is what gives you the minutes. The dial is slate gray, with a sapphire disc carrying the aperture and screwed steel elements around the outside. What has changed is entirely underneath. The movement is the calibre 1504.2 in place of the original 1504, with 21 jewels and a reserve of fifty hours. Twenty-one jewels against nineteen, and fifty hours against forty-eight.
Rebuilding a movement after eighteen years is a particular kind of decision and the changes are small on paper. The 1504 of 2004 carried 19 jewels and gave forty-eight hours. The 1504.2 carries 21 and gives fifty. Two jewels and two hours is not a headline, and it is also not really what the revision was for. Journe's own account is straightforward: the newer movement is better and more reliable, built with eighteen further years of experience behind it. That is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a formula. A manufacture that has been running a movement in the field for the better part of two decades knows exactly which components come back for attention, which tolerances drift over time and which assemblies cause difficulty in service, and none of that information exists at all at the point a calibre is first drawn. Adding jewels is one visible symptom of exactly that, since a jewel generally appears in a place where a pivot had been wearing. The reserve gain is another. What neither figure tells you is how many quieter changes went in alongside them, and those are the ones that actually matter across a forty-year ownership. A revision of this kind is bought on trust in the maker rather than on a specification sheet.
The case grew as well, and by a good deal more than the change in specification would suggest. The platinum original measured 41 by 34 mm at 6.7 mm deep; this one is 45.2 by 37.5 at 7.6 mm. That is around four millimeters in each direction and nearly a millimeter in height, which on a shaped case is a substantial difference rather than a nominal one. Some of the increase follows the movement, since a revised calibre carrying additional jewels was never going to be smaller than the one it replaced. The rest of it follows the market, because a 41 by 34 mm watch in 2004 was normally proportioned, and the very same case in 2022 would have read as distinctly small on most wrists. Whether the larger version is the better watch is a matter of taste and of wrist size, and there is no general answer to it. A shaped case at 45.2 mm across the long axis covers a good deal of arm. What is not in doubt is that the two are noticeably different objects to wear, and anybody choosing between them should handle both before deciding, rather than assuming the gold version is simply the platinum one rendered in another metal. The proportions are the thing that changed most.
Journe described this series as the final chapter of a trilogy begun eighteen years earlier, and the framing is worth taking at face value rather than as a phrase. The Vagabondage I introduced the wandering hours display in a flat tortue case. A second followed with an entirely different display, and a third came after that one, each of them working the same territory from a different angle and none of them repeating the last. What the 2022 gold series does is close the sequence by returning to the beginning: same display, same case shape, same dial description, in a different metal and on a revised movement. That is a genuinely unusual way to bring a series to an end. The conventional approach is to finish a trilogy with the most complicated version of the idea, and Journe instead finished with the simplest one rebuilt properly, which says something fairly direct about what he thought the interesting part had been all along. The display was the point, not the elaboration of it. Sixty-eight pieces against the original sixty-nine is very nearly the same number, and almost certainly deliberately so, which is the kind of quiet symmetry this manufacture tends to build into things without announcing it.
A recent limited series is considerably easier to verify than an old one, and the checks should reflect that rather than treating it like a twenty-year-old watch. Establish the number within the sixty-eight and confirm it against complete paperwork, which on a 2022 watch should still be intact. The sapphire disc carries the whole display and cannot be refinished, so examine it closely for scratches and for chipping around the aperture edge. Check the screwed steel elements around the outer dial for their seating and for any screw that has been disturbed. Then set the time forward through an hour change and watch the numeral hand over cleanly between window positions. On the case, 6N gold on a shaped profile shows polishing at the corners far more readily than a round case does, and a watch built in 2022 should not have been polished at all yet. Treat any softening as a warning about how it has been kept. Confirm the movement is the 1504.2 rather than the earlier calibre, and establish who has serviced it if anybody has, since a wandering hours mechanism is not general watchmaking.
