I really enjoyed the video. As someone who was a project engineer for many years and worked extensively on health and safety issues, including machine guarding, the lack of guards was pretty dramatic. Even on the press that was swaging the hands, the attempt at the moving guard to keep your hands out from under the ram was in itself a serious shear point. I guess they didn't have press "pull backs" then.
Pull backs were like a set of handcuffs that went on your wrists, and were hooked to the travel of the press ram, and if you didn't move your hands out of the way, the pull backs would "pull them back" out of harms way before the press reached the end of it's stroke.
Far cry from the interlocks on modern machinery with "fail to safe" designs for electrical, pneumatics, and hydraulics, and also lockout/blockout procedures.
Having been through many modern watch factories, things have certainly changed. In one factory of "the big three" they ran some operations lights out. The CNC machines would be loaded before people left in the evening, and they would come in the next morning to find parts that had completed that step in the manufacturing process waiting for them.
One thing that this video should highlight is that watch manufacturing on a mass scale is like any other factory job really. It's the same today, where only at the very end do "watchmakers" get involved in the process. Most of the processing is done by people who work on the factory floor batch processing parts through their specific station. They are not watchmakers, but people hired off the street and trained for the jobs they do - at least in most cases. There are still some very highly skilled jobs in production that sort of have their own trade.
Thanks for posting this.
Cheers, Al
