Making a Watch By Hand Is Far Crazier Than It Sounds

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Many fine mechanical watches are handmade to some extent. Expert craftsmen build delicate components into a tiny, ingenious machine, and artisans paint, carve, apply, and polish the elements you see on the outside. But Stephen Forsey of the esteemed Swiss brand Greubel Forsey says his Hand Made 1 timepiece is 95% crafted by hand-operated tools. It’s an extraordinary claim, especially for a watch that includes a tourbillon—a challenging, always-moving complication that helps ward off gravity’s effects on timekeeping. “It’s easier for me to tell you what we didn’t handmake than what we did,” Forsey says: only the sapphire crystal, mainspring, case gaskets, spring bars, and jewels.

The Competition

• Bovet 1822, an almost 200-year-old Swiss watchmaker, specializes in beautiful hand-painted or -enameled dials with designs from nature and fantasy. Each of its luminescent Château de Môtiers 40 “Butterfly” watches costs $52,000.

• Like Greubel Forsey, when Arnold & Son makes a new watch, it designs the movement from scratch. The stainless-steel Time Pyramid ($39,995) is a deceptively simple-looking skeletonized contraption with a tourbillon that seems to float in midair.

• Audemars Piguet’s $53,000 Millenary, with frosted white gold and an aventurine dial, isn’t as high-touch but captures a similarly layered effect as the Hand Made 1.

The Case

So far, there’s just one Hand Made 1, as production is severely limited by the pace of manually crafting delicate components such as a hairspring. (That’s the whisper-thin, coiled wire that controls the oscillation of the timekeeping device and perhaps the most impressive human-crafted item in the watch.) Each watch takes 6,000 man-hours to complete, with 800 individual parts fashioned by hand; Greubel Forsey hopes to make two or three a year, which means competition to own one should be fierce. It’s a handsome watch, with diagonally bisecting cutaway plates in nickel silver that are a signature aesthetic for the brand. 750,000 Swiss francs; greubelforsey.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net, James Gaddy

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