Venus Cal. 186 is part of the Venus 150 family of movements. It is a hand-winding column wheel chronograph movement. Similar to Cal. 150, it adds an hour counter at 6:00 and date pointer at 12:00. The dial features a 3-6-9-12 subdial arrangement.
Cal. 186 was introduced around 1949 and retired around 1960. It uses a 7-column wheel and has two pushers. The chronograph is engaged using a traditional horizontal clutch mechanism.
| No Hour Counter | Hour Counter | |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | Venus 150 Venus 151 | Venus 152 |
| Date | Venus 186 | |
| Date, Moon Phase | Venus 187 | |
| Day, Date, Month | Venus 191 |
Vénus is said to have sold the tooling for Cal. 150 and 152 to the First Moscow Watch Factory in the late 1950s. This was shortly before Vénus moved from their original factory to the former Pierce factory, also in Moutier. The company was focused on producing the cam-switching Cal. 210 Family and saw no need to continue production of the pre-war column wheel design. First Moscow Watch Factory produced the movement under the Strela brand, calling it Cal. 3017. It remained in production for decades there. It is said that as many as 100,000 examples were produced before 1980. The same factory later purchased the tooling for the Vénus-based Valjoux 7733 when the Moutier factory was halting production of movements entirely.
More detail on the history of Vénus is available in the Grail Watch article, “The Rise of Vénus, Legendary Chronograph Maker“