It's the New Year and a time that many of us set out for a fresh start and leave the woe of yesteryear behind. At Horage we never stop and the only resolution we have made is to continually chase microns and shorten the timeline to delivery.
A friend and fellow Horage lensman Kevin Lo was in Biel for a few days to see our production facilities for the first time. It was wonderful to show him around Biel and of course our engineering and watchmaking facility as well as sneak in a last-minute tour of Paoluzzo where we machine many of our parts. The timing couldn't have been better as we had just started milling Lensman 1 parts.
If you are not familiar with Kevin be sure to check out his Lensman 1 feature in the video below and to visit his Instagram page @the_vintage_guy. He has helped produce a lot of imagery for us with his unique and distinct way of capturing watches on their owners out in the street.
*Click the cc button for English captions 😉.
There are always a few projects we have going on in unison as there are multiple stages of our product development. If planned correctly we can become consistent in our workflow and this will offset the peaks and droughts that are often associated with small-scale production. On one side of the company, we are nearing the tail-end of our initial K2 movement/Supersede watch production and on the other side, we are machining the new parts that will make up the Lensman 1. Somewhere in between are engineering and new product development 😉.
At the moment our manufacturing team is busy producing the Lensman 1 main plates and bridges and gear cutting the tourbillon cage bridge. The team at Paoluzzo is busy milling both brass and titanium parts well ahead of schedule to keep production times in check.
There is a huge amount of analysis needed to ensure machines are dialled in and turning out parts with micron-level precision. Lorenz is constantly measuring the tolerances of the flat parts and Shpend our master gear cutter is working his magic with cutting the teeth of the titanium cage base plate with just a 10 micron (0.01mm) window of error to work with. This is the plate that the parts of the tourbillon cage sit on.
Titanium is otherworldly in just how light it is, but the weight-saving benefits add additional layers of complexity. When gear cutting the material hardness of the tool needs to be aligned with the metal being milled. Additionally, sharpness and the heat resistance of the tool are key parameters to arrive at the ideal chip formation. Chipping of material creates a clean and precise cut whereas an unsharp tool will cause bending or a gumming effect of the metal that increases burrs and naturally a suboptimal tolerance window would be reached. An investment and trust in minds that understand these complexities is needed.
The machines in use are programmed by the machinist, in this case, it's Shpend the master and Lorenz under his wing. There is an incredibly deep understanding required for cutting parts in these tolerance windows. Shpend has an otherworldly understanding and intuition of milling and is often asked by the manufacturers of the machines on how to mill certain parts. It seems counterintuitive that an independent machinist knows more about a machine than a manufacturer, but it's very much the case in most aspects of production. Many brands believe that simply purchasing a machine and running a program will arrive at the desired result, what they miss is the mind behind the machine that must use its creative abilities to push the machine to its limits while still preserving the machine and integrity of the part being milled.
Shpend getting ready to mill the carbide clamping tool that he will use for gear cutting the titanium base plate.
A closer look at what he is doing. Each part needs it's very own tool made in-house.
The clamping tool sitting above the bridge's spec sheet spec sheet.
Shpend in high gear stacking the gear package for the clamp
Lorenz with titanium bridges under the microscope.
Back to titanium. The titanium part that is currently being milled is the bridge that the entirety of the tourbillon cage sits upon. It's where all power is transferred to from the gear train and thus the reason it requires teeth to be cut. No two tooth formations are created equal and the team at Horage can simulate thousands of tooth structures to arrive at the ideal shape for each wheel. The tooth shape is important to increasing a movement's overall efficiency and thus the reason our team has invested their time in optimizing each and every turning part.
Once the brass and titanium parts are finished they will be sent down the road to our friends at Forplan to be de-burred utilizing magnetic mass finishing machines. A fast rotating magnetic field is utilized in combination with stainless steel pins. The motion of these pins enables them to deburr delicate parts and access small internal spaces of the part.
Parts are added into the mix and the steel then works its way around the part.
The machine from the outside
After the parts are de-burred it's onto decoration followed by plating. In between all of these steps quality control needs to be made to ensure that parts are within their zone of tolerance as well as the material finish itself is upheld. This simply means more measurement and visual inspection. The titanium parts will also be de-burred but this happens prior to gear cutting and following this pillar setting is done before the final PVD coating is applied. There are so many incremental steps required in watchmaking there simply is never a dull moment. Lensman 1 is well underway in production and there will be more updates as production steadily moves along. Till next time... Landon Stirling
*FYI in case you looked at an earlier version there was a small edit made to the page to update the deburring method used.