Old-world hand craftmanship lives on in the workshops of today’s high-end mechanical watch manufacturers.
Many people who love mechanical watches have a romantic notion of how they’re made: by white-coated watchmakers laboring diligently away at their benches, patient, calm, and efficient, in workshops quiet enough to hear a pinion drop.
Well, guess what? They’re right. Although such high-tech helpers as computers and robots have brought fine watchmaking to new heights, human hands, eyes, and even ears still play a surprisingly important role in haute horlogerie.
The Starting and the Finishing
It begins with the basics, the gears, bridges, screws, pinions and other remarkably tiny bits that enable a watch to tell time. In most luxury mechanicals, these parts are designed on a computer and made by computer-guided machines to tolerances of thousandths of a millimeter, precision unattainable by even the most masterly of master watchmakers. But once the components have been cut out, human hands take over. They perform the next crucial step, which is finishing the pieces, i.e., smoothing and polishing them. The purpose of finishing is to prevent friction when and where the pieces touch each other. Friction is timekeeping’s archenemy; it destroys accuracy and, in time, the movement itself. A watch movement is a friction catastrophe waiting to happen: its gears, pinions and wheels are constantly on the move; its balance, or timekeeping “heart,” swings back and forth 3.6 million times per week (for some watches, it’s an even more energetic five million times). Component finishing requires the dexterity and steady-handedness of a brain surgeon. It entails a bevy of different processes. Using a slender, hand-held cutting tool, a watchmaker cuts the burrs off the machine-cut bridges and base plates that serve as the movement’s framework, or skeleton. Grinding wheels, often made of wood, are used to polish parts so small they can barely be seen: pinions, screws and tiny wheels, which the watchmaker holds against the grinding surface with tweezers, checking again and again until they’re as smooth as silk. Even the minuscule teeth of the gears are hand-polished one by one.
Decoration
Some of the finishing processes are done for purely aesthetic reasons. These can include chamfering of steel component edges and polishing them to a high shine, using a small handheld polishing tool with a tip small enough to fit in the tiniest crevices. Some companies even go to the trouble of polishing the rims of the holes in which the jewel bearings are set so that the jewels will shine more brightly.
Watchmakers often embellish movement plates and bridges with a decorative pattern. One is called “Cote de Geneve,” French for “Geneva ribbing” or “Geneva stripes” (in honor of the world’s best-known center of fine watchmaking), a wavelike pattern of parallel bars. Some movement manufacturers produce them entirely by machine, but they can also be created manually with the help of a grinding wheel coated with abrasive past. Another popular type of decoration is called ” perlage” (derived for the French word for “pearl”), also known as “circular grinding,” which is produced by repeatedly lowering spinning wood sticks onto the bridge or plate as the component is shifted manually. Hand-engraving is often used to embellish plates, bridges and winding rotors or to inscribe on them the company’s logo or the movement’s serial number. Hard to imagine, but the fruits of all this beautifying labor often go unseen except by the watchmakers who perform it and those who later open the watch case to service the movement – although more and more companies are fitting their mechanical watches with transparent casebacks so the movements can be admired. Once the movement parts are finished and decorated, another phase of handwork begins: putting them together so they can tell time. A simple movement contains some 130 parts; complicated ones incorporate hundreds more. The watchmakers charged with assembling them sit in well-lit rooms (workshops always large windows to provide as much sunlight as possible), picking up tiny components with needle-nosed tweezers, placing them in position, and, when needed, screwing them in place with screws the size of caraway seeds.
Complications Require Expertise
Complex movements require specialists to assemble them. These watchmakers have been trained for years in the intricacies of such high complications as minute repeaters, perpetual calendars and split seconds chronographs. Some of these movements take days of even weeks to assemble and all require a separate expertise. A watchmaker assembling a repeater (a device that rings out the time when a lever is pushed), for instance, must have the ear of a maestro in order to judge the quality of the sound in the chimes.
Assembling the movement’s balance, i.e., the pinning of the balance spring into place and so-called “poising” of the balance wheel, or making sure that it’s weight is distributed equally around it’s circumference (like balancing the tires on a car), also involves manual, or partially manual, processes. Some companies fit the balance spring mechanically in some calibers and by hand in others. Adjusting the balances (also called “timing”), which requires measuring the movement’s accuracy in various positions (and sometimes at different temperature) and manipulating the balance to bring to bring its timing ability to within a certain standard, is also done by hand. Different types of balances are timed in different ways: by means of tiny screws or weights in the balance wheel or by making an adjustment at the balance bridge to change the effective length of the balance spring.
The Aesthetics of a Watch
A watch’s outsides, like its insides, owe much to the watchmaker’s skillful touch. Dials, for example, are often decorated by hand using a technique called “guilloche,” or “engine-turning.” It’s a way of engraving onto a watch dial (and, in olden days, a pocketwatch case) an intricate pattern of interlacing lines. Although on some dials guilloche-like patterns are simply stamped onto the surface, true, old-world guilloche is done manually by a skilled artisan using a decades-old guilloche machine (such machines are no longer manufactured). It’s an extremely complicated device, operated by turning a crank and thus controlling the engraving tool. The engraver must know exactly how much pressure to apply and must maintain that pressure evenly throughout the whole process. Myriad patterns can be engraved in this manner: scallops, waves, herringbone or checkerboard designs and nearly anything else you can imagine. Other manual tasks performed on the outside of a watch include polishing cases (which have been made by machine) with buffing disks; printing the numerals on the dial, using a hand-operated press; gem-setting the bezel, dial or bracelet (this is done by trained specialists and isn’t normally part of a watchmakers repertoire) and soldering bracelet links.
The Final Touch
When all the pieces are finished to perfection, human hands perform their final labor: assembling the components into a finished watch. The winding crown is added, the movement is placed into the case and the dial, hands, crystal and bezel are fitted onto the watch. Throughout it all, the watchmakers check and recheck their work. Are the hands aligned perfectly? Does the rotor make the correct whirring sound as it swings around its axis? When the answers to all these questions are “yes,” the watch is ready for sale, a high-tech wonder that owes much of its charm, not to mention its timekeeping prowess, to old-world watchmaking skill.
