Capsoil
History of the line
Capsoil was presented by U-Boat in November 2018 as a line bringing into the brand's catalogue a technical concept that until then had been new to the company: "Oil Immersion", that is, immersing the electronics and the quartz movement in an oil bath sealed beneath the sapphire crystal. The launch model, available in chronograph and time-only versions, combines, in the words of founder Italo Fontana, "retro lines" with a construction element entirely new to the brand.
Visually, the oil filling the dial creates a depth and colour saturation that a traditional dial cannot achieve, as well as improving the legibility of the hands; technically, oil immersion protects the electronic components and allows solutions such as dedicated locking rings and quick battery-replacement systems, later also adopted on the Capsoil Chrono model in steel and in a black DLC version.
The Oil Immersion concept, born with Capsoil, then became a broader technical platform for U-Boat: in 2021 the brand reused it as the basis for Darkmoon, a line built around the choice of dial colour — red, black, blue, green or brown — as a way of reflecting the wearer's mood, confirming Capsoil as the line that paved the way for this technological and aesthetic strand of the U-Boat catalogue.
Technical specifications
Founding models
The idea of filling a watch case with oil did not originate with U-Boat: in 2013 the maison Ressence had already proposed it with the Type 3, a mechanical watch with a dual-chamber case. With Capsoil, U-Boat applied the same principle in a different way, immersing the electronics of a quartz movement in oil rather than a mechanical mechanism.