Manufacturing process

Omega movements are hand assembled, albeit in an industrial fashion, i.e. multiple stations with the blanks moving along between them on conveyor/being rotated around for different steps. Went on a tour last year, very interesting to watch. Think the dials and cases have always been bought in. Final assembly is at headquarters and mostly manual as well, i.e. there are machines employed to set hands eg but they are manually operated.

Can you define what you mean by hand made? I see this term used often, but what does it really mean? That no power tools were used? If that's the case then no, watches haven't been made that way for a very, very long time.

There are very few watches made that aren't touched by human hands. Various functions are often partially automated. For example smooth balance wheels are poised in an automated system these days, with a machine removing the right amount of material from the balance. Here's the mark on the underside of a machined poised balance:



And here's one done by hand from a vintage watch:



Setting on of hands is often done by automated machinery - someone loads the hands into the machine, but the machine picks them up and presses them onto the posts. You can see that here in this Omega video at about 35 seconds in:


Many lubrication steps are done automatically as well. You can see that in this video at around the 30 second mark, where the machine is applying HP1300 oil to movements at Omega's factory:


Many factories, and now service centers, use an assembly line process for assembling movements. This is called sequential assembly, and it reduces the need for skilled labour, as people can be hired off the street and trained how to do one specific set of tasks in the movement, before the movement moves onto the next workstation.

This sort of assembly isn't new - this is a video I took at a watch factory in Switzerland in 2007 - Vacheron, so a company that at the time made maybe 50,000 watches per year tops:


In this video the worker is mounting mainspring barrels on the main plate, and under that table top there are a series of conveyors that circulate the movements around to be presented at the workstation. This was an isolated workstation, so my guess is that once she had installed barrels in each watch, she would get additional parts and cycle them all through again. Not sure when they would have moved on to another station.

Having been through a lot of watch factories, they are very much like any other factory. Most of the people who work in watch factories aren't watchmakers, just like most of the people who work in an automotive assembly plant aren't auto mechanics. Most of the work is done by unskilled labour, either running machinery or doping assembly tasks that they received on the job training for. The trained watchmakers are typically only involved near the end of the process.

While touring Patek Philippe I spoke with a machine operator who was frustrated that a batch of parts he set-up to run overnight on a CNC mill (when no one was there) ended up being messed up do to incorrect work holding.

My guess is the type of watchmaking you are thinking of when you say "hand made" is more like what the independent watchmakers in Switzerland do. This video shows the polishing process for watch lugs at Vianney Halter's shop:


If you think Omega is taking 2 weeks to polish a pair of watch lugs...well that's not the kind of watchmaking they do...in fact very few makers do this.

Cheers, Al

In general, I don't think it has all that much, but it depends on what you mean by vintage.

So here are some photos I took in the JLC factory...this is a machine making small parts - turning operation with multiple tool slides coming in with cutting tools attached, that are machining various parts of the watches:



The slides on this machine were cam driven from what I recall, so would a more modern machine be much different? Maybe CNC slides, but to make such a change there would have to be either a productivity or quality improvement to justify the expenditures. Figuring this out, sourcing the equipment, installing it and getting it running is the kind of work I once did as a manufacturing engineer, but not in the watch industry. But there has to be a nosiness case for it in the end, and depending on what sort of accounting you do, it could be anything from a simple payment, to present value payback, net present value...all the kind of things I'd rather forget these days...

More machining on a dedicated machine:



Manufacturing pinions:



Again machinery like this has been around for a very long time. In my previous job we had multi-spindle screw machines (made by National Acme) working in our factory that were made in the 1940's that were still very effective well into the 1990's. This sort of high volume production is not normally done with what most people envision as CNC machines, but with very specific, decidicated machinery made for the industry. The kind of machine shop CNC machinery that most people think of in a small machine shop is great for one off's, but not efficient in high volume production.

Here's a station where a lady worked all day using a microcope - her job was to push pallet fork jewels into the forks:



Trust me it's not an easy task (talk about jewels flying off in all directions), and she was lightning fast at it. Once the forks had the jewels installed, they went to the next workstation where shellac was applied to hold the jewels in palce:



The pallet forks are loaded into these gold coloured fixtures, and the fixture is placed on a very large heating plate:



Then shellac is melted and used to secure the stones:



Although the tools may vary slightly, this pallet fork assembly process hasn't changed much in a couple of hundred years...

To really see significant changes in how things were done, with more "one off" style watchmaking being the norm, you would have to go back to before the late 1800's, to a time before watch parts were interchangeable, and everything was custom made and fitted to each specific watch. Back then there was more hand work done, turning on turns that might not be powered, hand cutting and filing.

I think the automation that happens now is not so much in the manufacturing of the individual parts, but more in the assembly of them.

Cheers, Al

Speedmaster dials are somewhat of an oddity. The black layer is quite thick, so I'm not 100% sure how it's applied. For example the sub-dials have those concentric circles in them, and those have a profile, and although it's possible to build up layers of material using thicker inks with tampon (pad) printing, I'm not 100% sure how this black layer is done on the Speedmaster dials.

But tampon printing is another technology that has been around for a very long time, and I don't expect that the text printing on top of the black dial is done any differently now than it was in the 60's. I would expect that possibly the way the plates are made that hold the inks for the printing process may have changed, and that possibly the tampon printing machines are more automated than they once were, but the basic process has not likely changed.

Cheers, Al

Really interesting subject, thanks for posting. (And how lucky we are to have @Archer writing at such length.)
My 2c is, it's worth thinking just how far back all this goes. If you hear about a US entrepreneur, setting up in a cheap-labour country, strategically allied with a local power utility, building a soulless factory on an unprecedented scale in a previously neglected region - you might think that's a cautionary tale from modern times. But in fact, that's IWC in the late 19th century. Worth noting, the original entrepreneur received a financial bailout from local investors, who wanted in on the grounds that the product was of very high quality - there was no contemporary talk of down-market mass-production.

Good find very cool video