WatchTime - August 2012

WATCHtalk
Amateur Hour
What happens when eight journalists play
watchmaker for a day? Lots of trials and errors.
Ihate yoke springs. And I am not too
crazy about click springs, either, if you
want to know the truth.
What’s my beef with the springs, you
ask? Simple: The tiny tormentors, two of
78 components in an ETA 6497-1 caliber,
led to my undoing as an apprentice
watchmaker. And not just me. From the
moans and groans in the small conference
room at the Peninsula Hotel in New
York City one afternoon in May, the seven
other watchmakers-for-a-day were
having similar struggles.
Workshop leader Gianfranco Ritschel
The eight of us – each a journalist
who writes about watches – were participants
in a watchmaking workshop that is
essentially Watchmaking For Dummies (a
particularly apt description of our
group). It was sponsored by the Fondation
de la Haute Horlogerie, a Genevabased
organization devoted to raising
public awareness of the art and science of
fine watchmaking. The three-hour workshop
is one of the FHH’s educational outreach
programs, designed to give nonwatchmakers
a hands-on appreciation of
the intricacies of watchmaking. Led by
trained watchmakers (there were three
for the eight of us), participants learn
how to take apart the ETA 6497 and put
it back together again.
I agreed to attend the workshop with
deep misgivings. I’ve been covering the
watch world since The Flood, and have
been in enough watch factories to know
that my so-called “fine motor skills”
aren’t really all that fine. I looked forward
to spending three hours mauling a
watch movement in the presence of a
master watchmaker the way I look forward
to a root canal: I dreaded it.
Rough start: WatchTime editor-in-chief
Joe Thompson is befuddled by the loupe. ETA 6497-1 with the tools used to disassemble it
On game day, I get off to a terrible
start. In front of each of us is the movement
in a holder, a blue dish for the disassembled
parts, and our tools: three colorcoded
screwdrivers, tweezers, a plastic
stick called a buff, and a loupe. Step one
is pretty simple: Put on the loupe. But I
botch it. I wear glasses and I can’t quite
figure out how to use the loupe with my
glasses. As the rest of the gang, properly
louped, begin disassembling the movement
at the direction of our chief instructor,
Gianfranco Ritschel, I am making a
spectacle of myself futzing with my spectacles
and the loupe. Already behind, I
ditch the loupe.
The seminar has two parts. In part
one, you take the watch apart. Later, we
realize that’s the fun part. In part two,
you put the movement back together
again. Well, you try to, anyway. That’s
the nightmare part.
Ritschel explains to us that the ETA
6497-1 is a hand-wound pocketwatch
movement that was made by Unitas in
Tramelan, Switzerland, from 1967 to
1985, when production was taken over
by ETA. It’s a large movement (“a tractor,”
Ritschel says) 36 mm by 4.55 mm
with a 46-hour power reserve and a frequency
of 18,000 vph. Using our tools,
bit by bit, we disassemble it. We unscrew
lots of screws and out come the cock and
balance, the pallet, the ratchet wheel, the
crown wheel and the washer in the center,
the click and click spring, the barrel
bridge, the center wheel, the barrel, other
wheels, the setting lever spring and yoke