The Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1
A Look At True Luxury In Watchmaking.
Over the years, I’ve heard the phrase “hand made” used to describe lots of different watches and lots of different companies. Sometimes the term is more accurate than not. I’ve heard people say that their Rolex is hand made, that their Grand Seiko is hand made, that their Patek or Vacheron or Lange are hand made, and so on. The reality of course is that making watches by hand is something the watch industry and watchmakers fled from as fast as they could because making watches by hand means making a few watches, relatively slowly, and often with parts that are not interchangeable. The real hero of the modern watch industry is the oft-ignored and occasionally maligned CNC machine and other modern machine tools, without which the making of a million watches a year built to better than chronometer specifications (which is what Rolex does) would be flatly impossible. Even for high end luxury watches, basic manufacturing and many finishing process are automated, which means a loss of the knowledge of manual crafts but which benefits the consumer, who after all has certain expectations when it comes to accuracy and durability.
This is not to say that there are no humans in the loop – quality control checks can be automated but only up to a point – but making a watch by hand requires skills very few possess, and which are not taught any more (and in some cases, have not been taught or practiced for decades or centuries) in watchmaking schools. There is some hand finishing, for sure – Grand Seiko for instance, famously has diamond cut indexes and hands which are created manually, along with its signature heat-blued seconds hands – but the modern watch manufacturer’s perspective is that anyone who would insist on using a hand-operated gear cutting machine is both an impractical person from a profit perspective, and probably an incurable masochist as well.
So who makes watches by hand? Virtually no one. Daniels, Roger Smith, and Philippe Dufour are three examples of watchmakers who really emphasize manual processes in their work – I always felt that Daniels’ Watchmaking expressed a thinly veiled contempt for anyone who presumed to call themselves a watchmaker who didn’t know how to use a lathe and file – but by and large, a so-called hand made watch is anything but.
And then we have the Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1.
The Hand Made 1 was announced in 2019 and it is essentially the commercial outcome of the Naissance du Montre (“birth of a watch”) project at the Time Aeon Foundation. The Foundation was established in 2005, by a small group of founding members which included Philippe Dufour, Robert Greubel, and Stephen Forsey, to act as a kind of academy for conserving traditional watchmaking skills and methods, many of which were dying out as the older generation of retired master watchmakers was dying out. The idea was to keep these methods alive not just by cataloguing them, but also by putting them into practice, and the various projects that the foundation has undertaken, are sort of miniature museums of long-dormant watchmaking practices.
The watch is not particularly complex – it is basically a time-only watch with a tourbillon regulator. The case is 18k white gold, 43.5mm x 13.5mm, the tourbillon is a standard one minute design, and it runs at 21,600 vph/3Hz, for 60 hours. But as the old saying goes, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.
Hand Made 1 was launched some fourteen or so years after the establishment of the Foundation, but it is a beautiful demonstration of the fact that it is possible to use traditional – really traditional – hand-craftsmanship to make a watch from the ground up.
Every component of the watch, including the 272 movement components, and the 36 case components, are made by hand. What this means in practice is that the watch takes thousands of hours to complete – six thousand hours, and the amount of time it takes to make even the simplest component is astronomical because each component is not only made by hand, but also finished by hand to an almost supernaturally high degree.
The only components not made by hand are the sapphire crystals, mainspring, spring bars, jewels, and gaskets (gaskets were not on the watchmaking program, a hundred years ago, but without them even a slight morning mist could get into your watch and ruin your day). We all like to talk about how a properly hand finished movement has sharp inner corners and lavishly applied anglage and beveling – the Hand Made 1 carries this to an extreme and even the spokes and inner edges of the wheels of the going train are beveled, with sharp internal angles.
The tools used to make the Hand Made 1 are all hand tools, or machine tools operated by hand. One of the tools GF uses to make the watches is something called a jig borer. A jig is any tool that holds a workpiece in place so that it can be machined precisely, and a jig borer is used for precision drilling. Despite the fact that they were invented over a hundred years ago, they can mill to tolerances of 2.5 microns but you better know what you’re doing when you’re setting them up.
Here are some data points courtesy a fantastic article on The Electium from when the watch came out. It takes 35 times longer to make the tourbillon cage in GFHM1 than with spark erosion and CNC machines and some operations have to be split up into multiple operations because you can’t machine complex shapes in one part with hand operated lathes and jig borers. One screw – uno screw, amigos – takes 8 hours to make and you betcha there’s a lot more screws than one in GFHM1. One gear train wheel takes 600 times longer to make by hand than if conventional automated modern machine tools were used.
The balance spring wire alloy is rolled out in a hand operated rolling mill; the list of operations goes on and on and you can see, if you think about it, just how easily you can spend 6000 hours making one of these little gems – especially if you are finishing everything by hand. One screw head has to be polished on top, the slot needs to be polished, the edges of the slot need to be beveled and those bevels need to be polished; the sides of the screw head need to be hand finished as well. Do you have the patience? Me neither, but somebody does.
Making every single part from scratch, by hand, and deliberately avoiding any kind of manufacturing process or tool which isn’t at least a hundred years old, requires an increase in person-hours of work which is dramatically greater than beginning with CNC machining and proceeding from there to hand finishing, assembly, and adjustment.
The enormous additional expenditure of time for making a GFHM1 has to do with the philosophical orientation behind the watch, which is that it should represent a very particular kind of excellence, in which the capabilities of the human hand to create beauty on a microscopic scale are stretched to an extreme.
To look at the GFHM1 is to look at proof that so often nowadays in fine watchmaking, you are buying a machine-generated simulation of fine watchmaking and not the thing itself. It is worth remembering that the real definition of luxury rests on the fact that it ignores any sorts of economy in time, materials, and skill. Real luxury means that it costs whatever it costs, and it takes as long as it takes.