It has a different story to tell

It's a very interesting thing about watches

on the one hand you have a high precision device

and the other thing is

they have to be hand finished

which is very related to arts and crafts

You have these two worlds in one watch

both the aesthetical aspect of it

and the mechanical aspect of it

Here we are at Arnold and Son

in our premises at La Chaux-de-Fonds

where we manufacture all of our watches

Arnold and Son refers to John Arnold

who was one of the biggest and most important

watchmaker who ever lived

he invented a lot of technical solutions

still in use today

The aim of the modern company

to innovate and to continue his legacy

but in a contemporary, new manner

The idea is really to continue the story more than to repeating it

First with the design team

we design how the watch should look like

The size it should have, the thickness

you have to have a kind of mechanical harmony

is it good looking or not

and when we are happy with the new complications

and we think the watch has something new

then we create basically the inner works which will make the aesthetic happen

The first thing you have to do is to order the right material

because we use a lot of different materials into mechanical movement

going from brass over steel up to titanium or gold

and you need a specific material for every different part of it

once you have the raw material

you start really making the components

We have different kinds of raw materials going to different workshops

for depending on the part you want to make

If you want to do watchmaking on super high level

you need extremely skilled and specifically trained people

we have more than thirty different job descriptions

purely different educations

and you find these educations, these training

only in this region

because nowhere else in the world you need such kind of know how

Working with tiny parts is a challenge because tiny parts makes very small tolerances

We are working in micron tolerances

so you cannot do anything without good tooling

We have in house a tool making department

which makes from the little screwdriver the watchmaker needs

up to a stamping tool which takes months of development

The reason why we do all our tooling in house

because if you're not mastering your tools, you're not mastering the part you want to produce

Once all the parts are cut with machinery, they go to be cleaned

They're submitted o quality control, who decides if the part is good enough

to continue to the decoration workshop

Different kind of traditional movement decorations are applied

from geneva stripes, satin finish. Depending on the component

Is a mechanical watch you buy today is not a leading technology anymore

It's really crafts and arts

You are not racing for technological breakthrough

you are more racing for making more spectacular watches

You build a very different relation to a mechanical watch than you do to an electronic device

because the day you buy it you know that the next one will come

and that you will swap it for getting the better one

With a mechanical watch it's really the object as a physical object

of all the hand work which make it special and unique

That's makes I think a big difference to something more on the electronic side

Once these parts have been decorated they are quality checked again

to see if the decoration hasn't affected the functional aspect of it

That's always a bit if a trick you have to decorate but not deteriorate the part

They go to be preassembled in a specific workshop before going to the watchmakers

set stones for instance into main plates. Put axis onto wheels

and once all these parts have been preassembled, they arrive to the watchmaker who does the final assembly

The watchmaker gets all the little parts in little boxes

starts taking the main plate which is the base on everything gets built on

adding the wheels which is all on axis

put different bridges holding all different wheels in place

You have to add all the winding mechanism because you want to be able to wind your watch

put a dial on it then you put hands

and one last thing which we add always at the end is the escapement

which is basically the heart of any mechanical watch, it's also

what you hear when your listening to a mechanical watch when you hear the tick tock

It's the very first time you will see and hear your watch moving

Starting from the simple beating, it's a long process going to a highly accurate mechanical watch

You cannot just put the parts together and expect the watch to tell perfect time

We are checking the watches for 600 hours on different vibration and other machines

to get really sure that everything is ok

can be just s little tiny dust, you don't see it when you put it together

but when you move the watch it can a fild of the movement

So this process is pretty pretty long but this is what the complexity of such a mechanical device requests

Once that you've seen that the accuracy of the movement is good, you put it into a watch case

which will protect the movement

you add the bracelet, and the buckle and you have a watch

Watches are most of the time perceived as a time capsule

It's really something which are still built today as it used to be for the last centuries

It's nice also for people to be able to buy something

which has always existed and probably will always exist as a form of art