Perhaps it’s due to my own experiences working in various manufacturing facilities, but I am enamored with seeing things made. Of course, watchmaking is a much different scale than I’m used to seeing, but it’s still of great interest (side note: if you’re like me, you really should check out the show How It’s Made).
When it comes to the manufacturing of watches, we might tend to focus foremost on the movement, due to its intricate complexity, or perhaps the case, given that it’s something we can easily touch and innately understand what’s going on with the casting, stamping, and machining. Dials, though, generally get short shrift. Sure, we’ll look at how easy it is to read, and look for symmetry, things of that nature. But when was the last time you thought about how they were made? At least, since our last post (link) on the subject.
The folks over at Franck Muller want to change that. It’s one thing to read that they make them in-house, with the sun guilloche pattern, twenty layers of lacquer (which require an hour to dry for each one), and hand-painted Luminova on the numerals – you can understand that these simply take time to make, and some skilled artisans doing it. What really can drive things home in that regard, though, is a video, and that’s what we have from them. Give it a viewing, and you’ll gain a better understanding of what goes into the dial of a higher-end watch.
