Is watchmaking really a dying skill?

Amen.

Interesting I knew Jerry Pournelle quite well (*) and by association David Niven. I once told Jerry I mostly read dead authors. Jerry said "do not read my books, then." I guess sometime I will have to read his stuff. I did read the one about the comet. If I recall the comet was called Dante or something like that. It has been a long time.

I did not think much of the Dan Brown book of the same name. His stuff usually uses time magazine and national geographic as reference sources.

It is interesting how one can share information in conversation, that does not work in the written form. I notice this when I am around the SF writers. If i try to continue spoken conversation in email, it does not work. Perhaps writing is a way of life for some people. I now wonder if the same thing is true of watchmaking. Or any other discipline. I do not tend to write linearly, where is conversation I will jump back in forth as the thoughts progress.

I also tend to get Machiavelli, Dante and the Pilgrims progress mixed up. Never read Beowulf. These were often subjects one did have with such writers. No one really needs to read such works as they form the threads of all popular culture. Same can be said for some TV programs which distill these themes down into something that is probably allegorically like a mashup of a rolex and an apple watch. Neither of which repair is an option. (or just about anything after 2003.)


(*)Well enough to have attended his memorial service.

I suspect the current youth are too busy swiping left on their cell phones or apple watches 😁

As for robot repair. I suspect there is not much motivation to do so while labor is cheap. Robot assembly may also affect the reparability of post late 1990s watches. One technology that exists now and did not exist for some of my mentors who gave up wachmaking when their eyesight started to fail are microscope cameras. While is is hard to work in real time under them, they are invaluable for inspection. Computer vision has also come a long way in diagnosing medical imagry. Surgical robots are probably more common than most realize.

It really comes down to motivation and what is perceived as the quickest path to power and profitability.

I suspect "current youth" are not generally aware that this profession even exists, or that mechanical watches are thing. For the same reasons why I didn't go into buggy repair when I was younger...

Constantly crapping on "current youth" is certainly not going to be productive in getting them intereted in this line of work, but I'm sure it feels good...


In what way?

I think the barriers to entry are a bit on the high side, here in Australia there is virtually no path to becoming anything but a self-taught watchmaker unless you go overseas. Then I know a couple of fully qualified and trained watchmakers who worked for Omega ADs who are now on their second career having abandoned it because there is a pay ceiling working for an AD chain, but then there’s also a huge cost requirement to become an Omega certified watchmaker and get a parts account. So you either have to sit in that grey area and work without direct access to parts or find a new job if you want to work for yourself.

I think the answer I will give is "statistical tolerances." Robot assembly is going to be based on things fitting together a certian way.
When I toured the factories in the mid to late 1990s I saw a lot of CAD being used. This changes how things are put together compared to when done on a drafting board.

I often got frustrated when I took the wood shop (Renamed "Industrial Arts") most of the works was making jigs and fixtures. I simply wanted to make the thing. Not spend a bunch of time for what seemed to be make work. I did not have access to machine tools till I could buy them for myself. I then learned one had to spend as much time making the "jigs and fixtures"

Curiously statistics was one of my favorite subjects. Not the human services and financial parts, more of the parts relating to things like how bells and organ pipes make sounds.

I have mentioned before that one of my mentors had a Bechlor[sp] Cam driven automated screw cutting machine. I also made my own pinion cutting machine. Never finished the wheel cutting machine.

Recently I got out some old AI textbooks from when Neural Nets were a hot topic 30 years ago. It is interesting how some of the test cases relate to finding glitches in cam based automation. If only I had made the connection 30 years ago! What is different now is that computing power is 1000s of times more than it was 30 years ago. So these brute force methods are easier to implement. As one researcher told me some 20 or more years ago. AI does not get interesting till one has 2 trillion bytes to work with. I can go to Best Buy and buy a backup drive with that much storage.

The Jaquet Droz dolls that inspired me to learn all this stuff are based on the same cam technology as the Bechlor[sp] machine. Rotating disks that move rods and sliders back and forth. And probably the same statistical mathematics. Jaquet Droz studied under Bernouli, which is a better known name in the US. Probably since hard drives rely on the Bernuli effect to keep the heads from crashing into the platter. (There was even a brand name for a sort of rigid removable drive.) More spinning disks. Babbage used this same tech in his 1830s computer design. Abstractly there is no real difference between the dolls, Babbages computer, and the 2000 year old Antkeythera device. All of which use cam inspired statistics to do robotic like things. Ironically the Antkeythera device is based on a prior 1000 or more years of celestial observation. What they called the clockwork universe. --- And lead to the creation of clocks and watches. Because these cycles repeat. Some people also think that this type of mathematics can predict stock markets and gold futures. Not to mention tomorrows weather.

Part of it may also be what one of my mentors said. These people had a large network of freinds and family what made the dolls. They were not the work of one or two people. It really does take a village.

I think I am also relating my ignorance of automobile repair. (another cam driven machine.) Some of my cousins all did self repair and some went into the business and retired well off. They say that modern cars are more computer than car. They had crews of mechanics and location was a factor is their success. So it is more than simply knowing how to do the work.

For the most part I only have one "Modern" CAD designed watch which is the Tissot PR100 with the microgenerator. I never found the desire to save up for a coxial movement or other modern "Designer watch." Swatch and Casio watches expected. I have been trying to find "cheap" high value quartz movements to experiment with. Not alone as these are selling for some real money online. So someone is collecting this material.

Perhaps I a thinking of Swatch and Casio when I think of modern reparbility. I got two more Swatches this week to see if I can dissemble them.

I can not really speak though as to the repairability of the 2500K to 12K valued watches. Such watches are not practice for my feeble skills to contemplated working on. A glass free spring balance only seems like it could be repaired with a statistical robot finding the fault and choosing a matching part.

(apologies for this wall of text. as I said spoken word does not translate well to the written word.) Here is a photograph that says the same thing. It shows Babbage's workshop and is from Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit which is about the creation of the first computer and the havoc created by the IPO what sold stock to fund it. (and the only contemporary illustration of the difference engine cams. lower left. The calculating towers can be seen in the center shadows.) None of this was seen till the thing was built.



Robots have been around for a Long time ...

I don't really know for sure what you are trying to say here as the term "statistical tolerances" is a bit of a word salad, but if it's that having a "robot" assemble a movement means that it's somehow different for a human to service/assemble it later, then this is off base. The same process and final tolerances for parts would be observed, because those are determined by function, not by assembly method.

These movements are designed to be serviced, with a few exceptions. For mechanical movements the obvious one is the System 51. There are more examples for quartz movements, where they cannot be serviced, but for the most part these are exchanged at service anyway.


Having done plenty of engineering drawings on manual drafting boards, and also on CAD, I can say with certainty that the method of making a drawing doesn't necessarily change the design of the finished part as you are assuming. What it does do is make changing a design (say in the process of an iterative design process when making prototypes or something) much easier.

If the guys in question had to set up a shop from scratch, yes it’s expensive. But if you are setting up a modern shop, then what you need to get Omega certified would be minimal.

As I said I know little about high end watches post 1995 or so. They are too expensive to play with for the sake of exploration.

Some of what I am trying to share came from my mentor who died 20 or more years ago. He was a machinist and metalurgist, who ran a clock factory on the side. He also learned on museum quality watches which he had a substantial collection of. All pretty much old school. He sold me the CNC machine to prove the point that I could not make parts by simply "pressing buttons." I suspect he proved his point. I took the stepper motors off and returned the lathe to manual operation.

His shop manufactured stamped parts by the millions. 100K was a small order. So all I can base what I saw which is now half a lifetime ago. Like it or not modern manufacturing is a statistical process. Mean time to failure and yeald rate were used a lot when I was attending business meetings. I was part of QA so measurability was important. I suspect that cheap money through low interest loans drove a lot of this. And that was in the dot com era.

Ironically the Daniels co-axial escapement was being touted as "never needing to be serviced."

What I think I am trying to say. is motivation is the basic factor why there is a dearth of watchmakers entering the trade. Many may see the job as one what could be automated.

Yes, I understand what modern manufacturing is all about. I spent over 2 decades in engineering at a large multinational. Even our very small plant would turn out 30,000 parts per shift, 3 shifts a day, for just 1 of our production lines. Fractions of a second mattered and parts were being held to within a ten thousandth of an inch on the easy dimensions (fractions of that on the hard ones). We had computerized statistical process control in the mid-80’s. Nothing you are relaying is foreign to me.

I was there when we would get audited individually by each of the big three car makers (I ran the preventative maintenance program at that time, where we used things like vibration analysis among other tools to monitor machine performance and predict failures before they happened). I was there when we implemented ISO 9000, and was there for TS 16949 after that. I’ve been through a pile of the lean and six sigma training. This is all basic stuff for people in manufacturing.

But this has nothing to do with the current issues surrounding the lack of watchmakers. It’s all one big strange tangent to the discussion...


I don’t think motivation has much to do with it. Quite honestly it’s difficult to become a fully trained watchmaker. Unless you are lucky enough to live near or in a country that even has a school, you are going to face major barriers just getting the education that is required.

You could try for some sort of apprenticeship, but watchmakers are generally all far too busy trying to keep up to spend the necessary time to teach someone new. If they do, they know the person is likely to go somewhere else after as there are so many opportunities, so you are training someone for the benefit of some other business. I see watchmaking positions at large chains in the US offering six figure salaries, so there’s plenty of opportunities out there.

Interesting. That’s got to be quite a motivation for young people to enter the trade.
That’s very sad, almost an entire continent without a watchmaking school!

So it looks like a lack of educational facilities worldwide could be putting a stranglehold on the required number of new watchmakers needed. If I’d had to make a guess previously I would probably have attributed it to a lack of interest and that would have been a bigger problem for the industry. If there’s high demand and plenty of willing candidates then new schools would be financially viable, and when money is involved, demands are usually met. There is obviously a lot of lag though.

The additional good news for us collectors is that no one has yet complained of being unable to get their watch serviced or repaired, although the time to do so has increased substantially.

Thank you for all the contributions so far.

Here's a related anecdote. I just returned from my first trip to Switzerland. After visiting the Omega and Longines museums, we traveled to La Chaux-de-Fonds for the night to visit the Museum there the following morning.

We found an older two bedroom apartment that was inexpensive but also meant that the owner came to meet us with the key. She wasn't rushed and we chatted for awhile. The Museum of Horology is in LCDF and it is still a big watch making town, according to her, with many small shops who do specialty work that support the brands.

The interesting part of this is that she said many of the shops are filled with Portuguese workers. She made a quip that your Swiss made watch is actually made by Portugal. According to her, there is tension in the shops, as the companies don't have to pay as much to non-Swiss citizens, as well as as the old complaint that the immigrants are taking our jobs. But she said that there aren't enough interested Swiss to do the work. All of this sounded too familiar.

This probably doesn't give much insight into the future of watchmaking but it was an interesting local insight. My guess is that there is plenty of talent and desire to learn and work. It might get more expensive to service a watch in the future, but it's hard to imagine that there won't be someone.

I recently met a young man whose profession is information technology, but who has a deep and abiding fascination for mechanical watches. He has all the right characteristics to eventually become very capable in watch repairing. I have helped him with two of his earlier projects, including lathe work in replacing a balance staff. He has acquired about a dozen watches, including self-winders. He has serviced all of the watches he has acquired, on his own! He recently acquired the leftovers from a watchmakers estate, comprising approximately 100 Accutron 214 and 218 movements, dials, cases and hands. Also a dozen or so Omega F300 movements, dials, cases, and hands. And a few Hamilton Electrics in various states of disrepair. At present, he has the carcass of a 214 Accutron Astronaut which he ardently wants to return to health. He has also acquired numerous watch repair tools. He has no intention of ever chucking his main profession with the intention of changing professions. But let’s wait and see.