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 labors: 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.
