It could be the first time, GO has done this GO German Watchmaking class. The duration of the course is 1.5 hours.
The objective is to let clients & prospects have hands-on experience and feel the difficulty of just 3 processes out of many, so that they could appreciate the amount of efforts, artisan skills and dexterity to make the German mechanical watches.
The 3 processes are :
1) Assembling the gold chaton onto the bridge
2) Polish the swan-neck till it shines and
3) Put the adjusting-screws onto the balance wheel.
GO keeps the class small so that everyone has a chance to perform the above 3 processes. My class has 9 persons, and grouped into 3 groups and 'tutored' by 3 of Uwe Balir's competent students. These young people very good and speaks fluent English! So it is so easy to understand them and at the same time we can joke with them....however the tasks on hand were really very..very tough!
Kelvin Lim, Vice President of GO, greeted the class and set the agenda for the session.
The Team from GO Watchmaking School, 1 Master Watchmaker and 3 graduating students who will guide us. Their names (from left to right) : Uwe Bahr, Maria Tabaschnik, Johannes Geug and Eva Kuechler.
Lesson No #1- Assembling the gold chatons
The bridge and the golden chatons
My point & shoot camera not able to magnified more....it is a screw holding-plate...you can see like speck of dusts on the holes...those are the extremely minute screws, which is used to secure the chaton to the bridge.
Johannes demonstrated and explained the procedures...
Hands-on by George Ho.... firstly, place the chaton into the holes. Then align the groves of the chatons to the countersunk on the bridge. Get a plastic stick and press the chaton in firmly. Now the challenge is to pick and drop the screws into the screw-holes.
Lesson #2 - Polishing of the swan neck with a tin-bar....
The short clip will feature Maria explaining the steps to us.
Lesson #3 - Putting screws onto the balance wheel.
Eva walked us thorough the steps. We asked what is the time to complete putting all the screws onto one balance wheel. A short video ....
She replied, the experienced people can complete 1 balance wheel with 18 small screws in 2 minutes!!! It is like average less than 7 seconds to turn in 1 screw!! Amazing...we cannot even do 1 after 2 minutes! Better stick to our day-job.
You are supposedly to hold the balance wheel with your thumb and index, whereas the index and the third finger hold the container of screws...the fourth finger to rest on the pedestal of the microscope and the little finger anchors and stabilises the hand from any lateral movements. See how George did it!
Picking up one screw from the container.
Why does upcoming watchmaker carry along a dictionary ?
Eva's elegant vintage Glashutte, circa 1970... she serviced the watch herself after purchasing from a flea-market!
The leaner showing off what they were wearing...
A group photo with the pretty Polisher, Maria
Blueing Chart with the electronic iron...however we did not enough time to try it . :-(
Group photo of the GO team!
Kong
This message has been edited by Kong on 2007-09-06 21:28:31 This message has been edited by Kong on 2007-09-07 11:26:15 Amended title.
This message has been edited by Kong on 2009-07-28 14:19:25 This message has been edited by Kong on 2012-09-04 10:01:06
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