For anyone who is first becoming interested in watches – interested in watches as more than just incidental items for telling time – the natural first question is, how do you tell a good watch from one that is simply mediocre or downright terrible? This question can be very confusing, and the more you learn about watches, the more questions you have.
The watches that exist today, even if you exclude cheap quartz, seem to come in an almost infinite range of price and quality. We assume that as price goes up, quality goes up, but what does that mean? Why would a steel waterproof automatic watch from one manufacturer cost $500 and another $25,000?
Seiko SLA049, Naomi Uemura 80th Anniversary Limited Edition, and SLA051 (Unlimited). Both are around $3,000. Photo, James Stacy.
At this point in watch history, it has become pretty difficult to find a truly terrible watch. The basic technology behind watches has been through a process of incremental improvement for about five hundred years, and we humans have gotten really, really good at making them. The simple answer to this question is that a watch is a good watch if it is reliable, durable and accurate, and offers the right fit, finish and performance for what you paid for. A more interesting way to frame this question is to think about why some manufacturers’ watches are generally considered more refined than others.
At this point, I want to re-emphasize that fine watchmaking is not a requirement for making a good watch, nor does a watch need to be a high-horological achievement achieved by a reclusive artisan in the Jura to be a good watch, or even a great watch. Seiko, for example, routinely makes highly regarded watches that offer a lot of bang for the buck. Virtually everything Oris makes, too, is a great value, and so on. But while a Seiko Ice Diver or an Oris Big Crown Pointer Date are almost indisputably good watches (I say “almost” only because we all know that watch enthusiasts will argue about literally anything), no one would call them examples of fine watchmaking, at least not in the traditional sense.
What exactly is “fine watchmaking”?
Likewise, luxury watches and fine watchmaking are not necessarily synonymous. They can, but whether a luxury watch is also an example of fine watchmaking depends on the care, craftsmanship and time that went into making the watch.
Hand-finishing the pivots of a vintage watch in the Patek Philippe restoration workshop. Hand finishing can be decorative, but can also be done on working/functional surfaces. Photo by the author, 2013.
There are tons of good watches on the market, but few are truly fine, and like anything else, there are standards for fine watchmaking – not too long ago we had a lot of curiosity and confusion around the term fine watchmaking in our reviews. For me, asking whether a watch is a good watch has always meant asking what kind of watch it is intended to be, and to what extent it fulfills those intentions (a hard-to-read dive watch might be a postmodern ironic commentary on the absurdity of dive watches, but it fails as a dive watch).
However, in a narrower sense, the criteria for evaluating fineness – fineness? – in a watch has to do with one of the most discussed but hardest to evaluate aspects of watchmaking, namely, finishing.
Here, we are finally on more solid ground. The standard for high-end movement finishing depends to some extent on the finishing vocabulary the watchmaker uses – in British watchmaking, for example, the types of decoration are very different from those in Switzerland, sometimes radically so. But the standards themselves – in Swiss fine watchmaking, for example – are set for each type of decoration.
Okay, so what makes finishing “fine”?
The highest standard for finishing is that it should be hand-finished as much as possible. Partial or complete absence of hand-finishing does not mean no hand-finishing – watches with little or no hand-finishing usually have at least some hand-work, and sometimes a lot of it in assembly, quality control and fine-tuning. Some brands have a lot of hand-work in case polishing, or dial furnishing and hands, or dial making, but almost no hand-finishing in the movement. Still, a good clean industrial movement finish can produce a very handsome movement, with all the immediate visceral appeal you feel in the presence of precision machinery. But it is not fine watchmaking per se.
Basic industrial production: VALJOUX/ETA 7750, rotor removed. The steel parts are barrel-polished, most others are unfinished, with tool marks clearly visible on the screw heads and bridges. Bent wire and flat wire springs are used throughout.
Jaeger-LeCoultre Chronograph Minute Repeater Pocket Watch Movement, circa 1910. Note the beautifully shaped, tempered, and polished spring for the zeroing hammer at 6:00, compared to the 7750. Both the 7750 and this movement are, in their own way, examples of great watchmaking.
Both of these photos by the author were taken during a visit to JLC in 2016.
Truly top-level hand finishing is extremely difficult. And, it’s difficult in a way that few of us really understand. It requires a degree of manual dexterity that goes far beyond anything that everyday life normally demands of us. Certain types of surgery require a similar or greater degree of control – for example, there is a type of brain surgery for pituitary tumors that involves entering through the sphenoid tunnel in the nasal cavity – transsphenoidal surgery, which requires a distinctly supernatural degree of physical coordination. To put it mildly, most of us are not neurosurgeons, so the chances of us practicing anything that requires truly fine motor control are slim.
The author attempted to apply PERLAGE to a movement plate during a visit to Montblanc Minerva in early 2020 with the same precision as a craftsman who does it on a regular basis. He was unsuccessful (although did a very good job).
Unless you’ve been lucky enough to actually try hand-finishing in a brand workshop or factory tour (and screwed up at it, which is of course the inevitable consequence of letting amateurs take the best pictures), it’s almost impossible to understand what it takes in terms of talent and training to achieve it. But if you take a moment to wrap your mind around how difficult it is to do it really well, you’ll begin to appreciate the professional, human touch that fine hand-finishing has.
Girard-Perregaux Observatory Tourbillon, circa 1889
It’s hard, therefore, to look at an observatory pocket watch like this Girard-Perregaux and not feel a little humbled. At the time this watch was completed (1889), there was no such thing as automatic finishing, and a watch of this caliber was almost a one-off masterpiece. Look at the absolutely massive, beautifully shaped, polished, perfectly set jewels on each bridge; the complex geometry of the bridges themselves; the laboriously unhurried and meticulous polishing of each screw with its black-polished head; and, to top it all off, the thin tourbillon frame, beveled and black-polished with interior angles so sharp you could cut them yourself.
Kind of ruins you for anything else, doesn’t it? This was the true standard – before the advent of industrialised luxury, when anyone could buy a pair of sunglasses with a logo from an international luxury group – for true haute horlogerie watchmaking.
What makes “hand-finishing” so special?
For example, let’s look at beveling or chamfering. It’s a decorative technique usually applied to the bridges of a movement, which are mostly made of rhodium-plated brass, but also to some steel parts. Anglage is French for chamfer, meaning to create an angled transition between the upper surface and the side – usually a 45º angle, although some very high chamfers create a rounded chamfer (like Dufour Simplicity). If you look up the difference between beveling and chamfering, you’ll see that they do mean slightly different things, but in practice, the two are often used interchangeably.
Now let’s look at the first point, which must be made before we go any further: Each type of movement finishing can be done industrially, semi-industrially, or manually.
Hand-finishing techniques are at the top of the pecking order, and their presence or absence determines whether a watch is haute horlogerie.
The second point is that you can find examples of all three in various watches, mixed to varying degrees, and even in the same watch.
Even from a single manufacturer, you can often find a combination of industrial finishing (automated) and partially industrial finishing (some hand work and some automated work), and sometimes, both combined with some final hand finishing. Hand finishing using traditional methods is usually reserved for the very highest end of production.
Grand Seiko HI-BEAT Caliber 9S86
The simplest form of chamfering is to have no chamfers at all. For example, the Grand Seiko Hi-Beat calibre 9S86 has no chamfers on the movement, the flat upper surface of the rotor as well as the upper bridge and balance cock, just very sharp, crisp 90º angles with the sides. Yet the movement presents a very clean, honest look, the fact that it was designed with reliability, durability and precision as the top priorities is immediately apparent. Compare it to the unfinished Valjoux/ETA 7750 movement above and you can see that there is simply no comparison.
This is the same approach taken by other brands in industrial-grade movement manufacturing, including Rolex, Omega and Oris. Incidentally, you’ll notice that the finishing performed by the machines is not a single style. Each company puts its own stamp (a weak pun intended) on their movements.
The next step is to create the chamfers using either a stamp or a computer-guided milling cutter. These methods both produce visually pleasing results and give you consistency across your production range in high-volume production, in exchange for a fairly minor increase in production time and complexity. This is relative, however, as each additional decorative finishing means an additional step, and depending on the degree of finishing applied, the additional time can be considerable.
Omega Calibre 3861: High-quality finishing for an industrially produced movement. The jewels and screws are polished countersunk, and the bridges have straight graining or Geneva striping; the chronograph bridges and balance cock are chamfered and mirror-polished, although there are no sharp internal angles. There is a very nice, sharp transition to the right of the “CO” in “Co-Axial”, though.
The haute horlogerie approach is another matter. The truly traditional approach is to take a bridge (for example) and finish the flanks (the vertical sides of the part), then use a file to form the chamfers. The marks left by the file are then polished away with a stone polishing tool. The final polishing is done using increasingly finer abrasives and finished with a piece of nail wood covered with diamond paste. The wood used is the woody sapling of the gentian plant, which grows wild throughout Switzerland (the Swiss use it to make gin, which can be burned off the ’59 Chrome on the Caddy bumper. If you’re having fondue in Switzerland and you’ve been brave enough to think a pair of three gentian gins is a good idea, don’t. Ask someone who knows.
Work in progress: Montblanc Minerva Outer Circle Tiger Trap
Finished product: Upper bridge of the Outer Circle Tiger Trap. About two weeks, start finishing polishing.
It’s been said (and written) that one of the hallmarks of hand-chamfering is the presence of sharp inner and outer corners that cannot be replicated by CNC machines or stampings, and as far as I know, this is still true.
Is the movement in your watch hand-finished?
You may now be starting to wonder if there isn’t a lot of hand-finishing in modern watchmaking. You are right about hand-chamfering from start to finish. Firstly, it is not taught in watchmaking schools, which usually focus on watch repair rather than watchmaking, let alone hand finishing. This means that most people who actually know how to hand-chamfer are taught in the workshops of manufacturers who still train people to do it. When you remember that chamfering on a single bridge can take ten hours or more, and that it requires a high level of training and skill, you start to understand why you don’t see it as often as you might think.
So how do you tell if the chamfers on a watch movement are truly done by hand? This is the hard part – it might really be hard to tell the difference. We often think of hand-finishing as ubiquitous in all production of fine watchmaking brands, but is that really the case? If you’re wondering whether your luxury watch is truly hand-finished, top to bottom, stem to tail, think about the economics involved.
If you’re a luxury watch brand and you produce between 60,000 and 70,000 watches a year, the chances are high that hand-chamfering is done on every single bridge of every single watch. On the one hand, there aren’t enough people who know how to handle that kind of volume, and on the other, it adds dozens of hours and a lot of uncertainty to the manufacturing process. Where you tend to find the most hand-finishing is in high-prestige traditional movements, as well as very low-production high complications and other “conversation pieces”. Is a watch without hand-finishing a bad watch?
It’s worth pointing out that partial hand-finishing or even the lack of hand-finishing in a movement doesn’t mean that the watch is necessarily poorly finished, and it definitely doesn’t mean it’s a bad watch. Good automated or partially automated finishing is still finishing – it’s not like you ordered a premium rib au jus, and got the walnut curd bread with a side of Vegenaise. The entire history of watchmaking, since the invention of the milling machine about two hundred years ago (originally invented for the gun industry to make guns with interchangeable parts), has been about the pursuit of better mechanical precision.
Rolex Acacia, from BEN CLYMER 2015 visit. How to produce a million watches a year, with extremely strict quality control, and all with better than chronometer precision.
Workbench, Philippe Dufour. How to produce a few watches a year (if that), and always with top-notch hand finishing.
So the problem is not the machines – without them Rolex would not be able to produce a million watches a year, all keeping the time to within ±2 seconds a day. The actual hand finishing of an entire movement is a very specific, very time-consuming, specialist process, and today it is about the preservation of traditional techniques. It is a huge added value if you care about this kind of thing, but it does not make the watch more accurate, reliable or durable.
The only problem comes when you think you are getting something that you are not. Are you getting true haute horlogerie, or are you basically getting an illustration of haute horlogerie?
Chances are, a company that spends so much time, effort, and energy on handcrafting isn’t going to hide their light under a bushel. They’ll show you. If they don’t show you, then it’s reasonable to ask if they’re actually doing it, and if so, where exactly in their lineup they’re doing it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with some combination of semi-industrial and industrial finishing in a mass-produced luxury watch movement, but it’s unrealistic to think that luxury watch brands can arbitrarily scale up full, comprehensive hand-finishing on tens of thousands of calibers.
Dufour is simple. Technically, the finishing is as good as it gets, but it also serves the overall design of the movement. Large and small bridges adjacent to the sides
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