Movement Finishing in Modern High Grade Fine Watchmaking

Of all the crafts associated with fine watchmaking, there’s none more fundamental, none which really defines what fine watchmaking is, more than movement finishing, and specifically, traditional hand-finishing. It’s a subject that seems inexhaustible both in depth and detail, and the amount of controversy it can create and the complexity of the subject means that it is, more than just about any aspect of watchmaking, apt to be misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Usually, when watch enthusiasts talk about movement finishing, they’re talking about a specific style of finishing which evolved in the Swiss-French watch industry. This style of finishing has its own very involved vocabulary. Anglage, for instance, refers to the creation of a bevel at the transition between the upper surface of a movement bridge. Like every type of movement finishing, it can be done mechanically and automatically, by computer guided cutting tools or other automated methods; it can be done semi-automatically, with hand-guided machine tools, or it can be done entirely with hand-held tools like files, burnishers, and wooden rods charged with polishing compounds.

Why, you might ask, would anyone bother to hand-finish a movement at all?

To help shed a little light on the subject, let’s look at types of finishing. There are basically two kinds of movement finishing.

First, there is functional finishing. Most of the components of a watch — anything that moves — is going to interact with another component or components. Finishing in this case is in the pursuit of reducing friction and improving functionality overall. Polished pinions and gear teeth will work against each other with less friction, which means energy will be transmitted through the gear train more efficiently and also more smoothly. Perfectly polished pivots of high quality hardened steel will turn in their jeweled bearings with almost no friction at all (especially if lubricated properly). Finishing can also help protect components against corrosion, as in the heat-bluing of steel parts; black-polishing produces a surface which tends to resist corrosion as well and there are watches hundreds of years old (including many made by Breguet during his lifetime) in which the black-polished steel parts are as unblemished as the day they were made.

Second, there is decorative finishing. These include the famous “Côtes de Genève” or Geneva waves, which are ubiquitously applied to movements designed and manufactured in the Swiss-French movement design language, as well as all the various types of engraving that are applied to movements (the A. Lange & Söhne hand-engraved balance cocks don’t have any effect at all on the precision or running efficiency of the watch; Lange does this as a gesture to the history of the company as as a manifestation of its commitment to craft).

It’s important to remember that there is not a hard and fast distinction between decorative and functional finishing. Excellent functional finishing gives a watch an extremely elegant, sophisticated and even dignified appearance and is a visible manifestation of the care and thought put into it by the watchmaker. And finishing which you might classify as purely decorative often arises out of functional considerations and becomes decorative when applied with skill and care.

The reasons for finishing components of a watch are rooted in one basic fact: to produce a watch component, different materials have to be machined, and the machining process leaves debris and tool-marks which have to be cleaned up. The fabrication of raw components often does not produce components which are ready to be used as is (this with the caveat that with modern machining methods, you can definitely produce movements with good performance that are only minimally machine-finished).

Watch and clock-making began as purely manual crafts and the tools were quite simple. These consisted of files, hand-drills, hammers, saws, and hand-guided lathes. Cutting out a movement plate or bridge would leave burrs from the cutting tool, as well as visible tool marks, and these would need to be removed. Filing the edges clean would leave an angled surface and to further refine that surface, burnishing and polishing tools would be used to produce a surface with even geometry and a uniform appearance — this anglage was therefore born out of necessity, and refined out of a natural extension of good, conscientious workmanship and the watchmaker’s pride in their craft. Steel parts produced by cutting and filing, would likewise need to be polished to remove tool marks and it would be a natural expression of care in craftsmanship to bring them to a high level of finish — as well as helping, as we mentioned, to keep the part from corroding.

Movement finishing has changed in some significant ways over the centuries. Brass has been used for movement plates and bridges for hundreds of years but for much of that time, the brass base metal was protected from corrosion by plating it with gold. Today, movements are still made of brass as the base metal (with some notable exceptions, including F. P. Journe, whose movement plates and bridges are made of rose gold; some makers, such as A. Lange & Söhne, use so-called German silver, which is an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc). The standard in the watch industry now is to plate movement parts with rhodium, a platinum-group metal, although some makers — including the English maker, Roger Smith — still use gilded movements, in keeping with the English watchmaking tradition.

Movements made by Breguet during his lifetime do not exhibit many of the finishing techniques collectors today associate with fine watchmaking. Plates and bridges were fire-gilt (a nasty process involving toxic mercury fumes and strong acids) and there are no Côtes de Genéve to be seen. Anglage is minimal at best and is obviously primarily functional, intended to produce a clean finished surface and remove tool marks, not dazzle the eye. However, the level of craftsmanship is extremely high (as you’d expect, given Breguet’s reputation) and Breguet’s work is a definitive demonstration of the beauty created by the highest manufacturing standards taken to their logical conclusion.

Movement finishing began as a consequence of hand-manufacturing techniques and is still associated with the highest-quality work, but actual hand-finishing using only traditional methods throughout the watch, is very rare today.

Movements made by Rolex, for instance, are not hand finished using traditional methods. At about a million watches a year, there are not enough workers skilled in hand-finishing in the entire world to hand-finish Rolex’s yearly output. This does not, however, mean that Rolex movements are poorer quality movements. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rolex uses modern high precision machining techniques and modern, very sophisticated quality control systems to produce consistency in watch precision to an almost unbelievable degree — making a million or so watches annually capable of keeping time to Rolex’s internal standard of ±2 seconds per day is an achievement that would have made watchmakers of previous generations sick with envy (including Breguet, who was a highly pragmatic person, obsessed with practical watchmaking problems). While hand-finishing is not part of watchmaking at Rolex, there is a great deal of hand-work and inspection during the assembly process.

A movement may have good or even excellent visible finish, without being the product of traditional hand-finishing throughout. Anglage, when produced by hand using hand tools, is a multi-step process. The part as received from the machine tool has its edges beveled with a file as a first step. The filing should produce a bevel which is uniform in width and angle, which does not change as it follows the contour of the part, and outer corners as well as inner corners should have sharp transitions at the same angle as the bevel. The bevel produced is then worked with a burnishing tool to remove tool marks — again, this has to be done carefully in order to avoid distorting the angle of the bevel — and then polished with a series of progressively finer polishing tools. The final polish is applied using sticks of wood made from the pith of the gentian plant, which grows all over Switzerland (and is used to make some of the nastiest tasting schnapps in the history of schnapps) which are trimmed by hand by the watchmaker and charged with diamond polishing paste.

If you think about it for a minute, you’ll begin to understand why really traditional hand-finishing is so rare even in high-end luxury watchmaking. As SJX over at WatchesBySJX notes in his excellent article, “Movement Finishing In The Instagram Age,”  “Hand finishing techniques are difficult to master, practiced by few, and do not scale.” The general practice nowadays is to use various machine-aided techniques to produce anglage — a necessity given the hundreds of thousands of luxury watches produced every year by makers like Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron.

Anglage may be produced at the same time a part is machined in a CNC machine. It can also be produced by stamping, and machined anglage can also be refined by hand, using manually guided power tools. The use of polishing wheels still requires considerable care and attention from the watchmaker, since the tool can remove metal very quickly and if the process is not controlled well, the geometry of the part can be destroyed. Bevels and anglage can also be produced by diamond cutting tools, which create an extremely clean, attractive, geometrically consistent bevel which is mirror-polished by the machining process itself, and which requires no further finishing.

Because hand-finishing is so time and labor-intensive, and because it cannot be done at scale, hand-finishing throughout the entire movement is extremely rare, and usually found at independent watchmakers producing extremely small numbers of watches. Roger Smith, for instance, uses CNC machines as the first step in production of his components, but every component undergoes multiple hand-finishing processes afterwards and as a result, about 10 Series 2 watches are produced each year.

Modern movement finishing may in most cases not involve traditional hand-finishing techniques all the way through but the presence or absence of such techniques is a matter of degree — the watch world is not divided into rare, fully hand-made and hand-finished watches of peerless artistry on the one hand, and mass-produced soulless junk on the other. Even mass-produced movements with little hand work in their production can produce good to excellent performance, thanks to modern high precision manufacturing techniques.

Let’s look at a high grade, hand-wound modern movement from Patek Philippe. One of the hallmarks of hand-polished anglage is the presence of sharp inner corners. Patek Philippe’s relatively new Calatrava reference 6119 was introduced in 2021 along with a new movement, the caliber 30-255. The caliber 30-255 replaced (in the Calatrava) the caliber 215, which Patek first introduced in 1974, which was a relatively small (21mm x 2.5mm) movement, with a 44 hour power reserve.

The caliber 30-255 does not have any internal angles, which, again, are considered the hallmark of hand-applied anglage, but that is only one of the criteria which can be used to evaluate the movement and moreover, far from the only important one. The 30-255 is a more modern and better-engineered movement than the 215 by just about any measure. The power reserve is longer — 65 hours — and it is 31mm in diameter, making it a much better fit for a modern wristwatch (the 6119 is 39mm x 8.08mm) and the 30-255 has been designed so that despite the long power reserve and the use of two large mainspring barrels, it’s still flat enough to maintain the elegant slimness of the Calatrava family. There are a number of fine finishing elements in the movement as well (neatly applied Côtes de Genève, mirror-finished countersinks for the screws and jewel settings, sharp outer corners on the anglage on the small bridge at the center of the movement, and so on). Whether or not the architecture of the movement is an improvement over the traditional full-bridge construction of the caliber 215 is a matter of taste, but the design of the 30-255 appears to have arisen out of thoughtful consideration of solutions to watchmaking problems, not any desire to increase economy of manufacturing.

It is in short, a thoroughly modern, high grade, hand-wound movement, well finished, with well thought-out watchmaking and engineering throughout and one which should be more reliable, more precise, and easier to service than the movement it replaces.

Finally, movement finishing is like every other aspect of mechanical horology, constantly evolving. There are, certainly, makers like Akrivia, Philippe Dufour, and Romain Gauthier who practice traditional movement finishing in the classic Swiss-French style. There are makers like Greubel Forsey, who combine different finishing styles — Greubel Forsey’s complicated watches feature incredibly time-consuming classic Swiss techniques with a style partly derived from traditional English pocket watches. There is Roger Smith, with his fastidious, it-takes-as-long-as-it-takes-and-it-costs-whatever-it-costs approach to making watches in the classic English style. And then, there are manufacturers like Richard Mille, or URWERK, or De Bethune, which have all created their own unique approach to movement design and movement finishing.

More than ever, it’s important, when talking about movement finishing, to understand the long history and many traditions that hand-finishing represents, and what they mean. Only then can we understand, in its modern context, what hand-finishing means — and how some of modern watchmaking’s most important players are changing the game.