Needless to say, Cartier has its own high jewellery department in the manufacture to work on high jewellery watches. Only the very highest end jewellery watches are created here, including the unique pieces with dozens or hundreds of carats of gems unveiled each year at SIHH.
This atelier includes both jewellers, who work with metal, and gem-setters, who each sit on one side of the room.
This atelier creates jewellery from start to finish. High jewellery watches begin with the drawing, before progressing to prototyping – creating resin or wax model, followed by a brass prototype.
Below: The progression of the piece unique double Panther bracelet watch from drawing to prototype to finished piece at SIHH 2010
Making jewellery is an extremely labour intensive process, much more so than most of watchmaking. The precious metal is cast via the lost wax casting technique, before being cut by hand – a manual saw is used. Polishing is done with a hand-drill, much like that in watchmaking and probably the most high-tech part of the process. Gem-setting is then done by hand as well. The work here is much like the work done at the high jewellery workshop in Paris, except only timepieces are made in La Chaux-de-Fonds while Paris makes all kinds of jewellery and objets d'art.
Below: Gem-setting
As each gem-setter is responsible for an entire piece of jewellery, so piece of jewellery is stored in a tray marked with the names of each of the gem-setters.
click here for Part XIII. This message has been edited by SJX on 2010-07-08 07:52:22