Formerly two distinct entities, CPDH and Cetehor, Francéclat is the modern trade body that oversees and promotes the economic development of the jewellery, tableware, and timepiece trades in France.
Serge Maillard, writing for Europa Star, delves into the group's history and ambitions for the future of French watchmaking.
Designed by Zanwen Li, the Mobius Ring Calendar Clock captures both the infinitude and cyclical nature of time.
Utilizing magnets hidden within the three-dimensional form of the möbius ring, the owner of the calendar can move the ferrous marble indicating each day and month by hand to record the passage of time.
In clocks and watches that employ cycloidal tooth forms, the upper portion of the gear tooth flank employs an epicycloidal form (versus the hypocycloid arc that leads into the valley formed between two gear teeth inside of the pitch circle). Sophie Houlden has taken this same mathematical principle, normally used to form gear teeth, and applied it to display the time in a unique but intelligible way on the dial of virtual clock.
While a multiplicity of one-piece tape dispensers made of plastic have existed for decades, the Push tape dispenser made by German Industrial Designer, Jasper Ohainski, while he was a student at Kunsthochschule Kassel in Northern Germany, takes the concept to a sculptural level.
Fit for display at a museum of modern art—or, at the very least, fit for sale in its gift shop—the (almost) one-piece tape dispenser was crafted from a single sheet of laser-cut, bent, formed, and polished brass with a small support rest inserted as a convenience for the end of the tape to stick to after it has been cut.
Anti-magnetic timepieces employ Mu metal shielding to redirect magnetic fields around, rather than through, the watch movement.
From the MuMetal Magnetic Shield Corp. FAQ:
MuMetal re-directs magnetic flux so it lessens the magnetic field’s influence on the item being shielded. Shielding does not eliminate or destroy magnetic fields, nothing does. It does, however, provide an easy path for the magnetic field to complete its path. You may think of it as a magnetic field conductor or shunt.
Hat tip Jack Forster.
JX Su in conversation with Rexhep Rexhepi on the pressures of one of his time-only timepieces recently selling for 7 figures at auction and what the fallout from that entails. The duo dive into Rexhepi's history, the watchmakers he looks up to right now (Kari Voutilainen and F.P. Journe), and the journey still unfolding in front of this promising, young watchmaker.
I think in life we have ups and downs, so it is very important that we remember that. You have to learn to go slowly.
Leveraging the same biotech stack that enabled the rapid development and rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, scientists at Donghua University have genetically engineered silk worms to produce spider silk.
At 6x the toughness of Kevlar, spider silk is a supermaterial. However, as the teams involved in providing spider silk for fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore will attest, harvesting it in any useful quantity is no easy feat. Silk worms, on the other hand, have been used in the mass production of silk for millennia, through a process known as sericulture.
From eponymous, white-labelled watches to partnerships with NASA and Omega, Charles Schultz's beloved beagle has a longstanding legacy in the watch industry.
Robert Leedham, reporting for GQ, dives into the process that Paige Braddock and his team at Charles M Scholtz Creative Associates went through, alongside the designers at Apple, to create the 12+ minutes of animation that lend a splash of whimsy to the new Snoopy dial available in watchOS 10.
Jack Forster on the quiet quality "without a lot of superfluous razzle-dazzle" of the KSK SJE087:
When I put the KSK on for the first time, the first actual thought that came to mind was that this was one of a very small group of watches I could think of that would make a perfect, one watch collection, daily wear piece—good looking, from a real brand with real history, but not so precious or dear in terms of price that you’d balk at living with it on a daily basis.
Thor Svaboe, writing for Fratello, goes behind the scenes at Laurent Ferrier and F.P. Journe's Cadraniers et Boîtiers de Genève, who produce the dials for Laurent Ferrier and others, including Vacheron Constantin.
To me, what’s inside the case is almost more important than the actual function of a watch, not to mention the time it takes to finish and assemble and finish a piece of Haute Horlogerie.
On the heels of the Swatch × Blancpain collaboration, Nick Hayek Jr. provides Bloomberg's Andy Hoffman and Julius Domoney an inside look at how Swatch's patented Bioceramic material is made.
Alluding to the overarching impact that the recent Swatch collaborations have had, Hayek boasts that they've shown prestige brands that:
We have created a new market, there is an opportunity to reach the younger people without harming your own image.
Mille's declutchable rotor is a novel workaround to the problem of having too much energy at the disposal of a mechanical watch equipped with an automatic winding system.
Traditionally, this issue has been addressed through the combination of thixotropic lubrication on the barrel wall and a modified mainspring that can slide along the barrel wall to dispel excess energy when the equilibrium viscosity threshold of the lubricant is met. Said another way, once enough pressure is exerted on the barrel wall lubricant it suddenly becomes slippery and the mainspring can glide across it, but when pressure is any lower, friction remains high enough to hold the mainspring in place.
While it works, this latter approach results in an inconsistent power delivery curve. Theoretically, a declutchable rotor should do away with this inconsistency while simultaneously reducing wear in an area of the watch that often needs addressing when it comes time to service. Not to mention, for Richard Mille, any excuse to use "clutch" in marketing material is gold when it comes to his speeds-and-feeds, motorsport-loving client base.
Donnie Hinske, of Titans of CNC, tours the factory in Switzerland where Tornos builds its world-class CNC machines.
The tiny part that Donnie is so exuberant about at the beginning of the video is a balance staff for a mechanical watch. The 0.165mm diameter that Michael Hauser relays when they dive in a little deeper just before the 2 minute mark is actually on the larger side of the spectrum when it comes to the pivots of a balance staff, which are routinely closer to 0.100mm in diameter. I've handcrafted several in the 0.090mm range and as small as 0.080mm for various restoration projects over the years. There is little sense comparing what the human hand is capable of relative to these massive Swiss CNC lathes, though. The speed, repeatability, and precision of the components that Tornos' machines can crank out is remarkable.
Donnie also gets particularly excited about a 33-spindle machine in this video. I, for one, am appreciative I finally have something to point people to when talking about this level of Swiss micro-machining. Shortly before the launch of the Apple Watch, I had an opportunity to spend a week inside Apple's design studio and adjacent model shop at Infinite Loop 2. At some point, I got to talking with one of the CNC operators in the Industrial Design Group about some of the more advanced CNC machines we had each encountered and he looked at me like I had three heads when I articulated the capabilities of a 32-spindle unit. To this day, I still don't think he believed me.
