AHCI - Calabrese - real man - real atelier

Calabrese - real man - real atelier - real watches

Don Corson's recent posting (click here ) reminded me of some unpublished photos of our trip to Lausanne.

Mrs MTF and I did the 'blue rinse brigade' thing, and visited Lac Leman (Geneva) in November 2005:

Ch. de Chillon: click here

Montreaux with Mercury: click here

Here is why we made the pilgrimage to Lausanne........

Vincente and his daughter - the lovely Tina

Two of the nicest watchmaking "industry" people.

Real working machinery

Want a component? Make one.

Lone watchmaker's electronic milling aid

That's as close to CNC as you are going to get for "hand made"

How to QC your own work

Yup - just as I planned.....it fits!

Real work Real millings Real waste

Hand made

You will see this later........

Mini-CNC machine

Testing your own work - How many positions was that again?

Despite being a Founding Father of AHCI, Calabrese was an early adoptor of CAD

We were visiting from Japan - what a nice touch on screen!

Although the base ebauche may be bought in, the re-worked and ADDITIONAL home-made components still need detailed CAD software to ensure everything works afterwards!

Real Calabrese watches are much more than just casing up cookie-cutter movements. They are effectively in-house manu(hand) - factured(made).

Looks familiar?

Last remaining Calabrese signature pieces (2005)

Now you see it - Day time

Now you see something else - Night time

Calabrese's own watch

Cool !

Our first reason to visit Calabrese was to collect a watch that he had repaired.

The original brand had in-licensed the design from Calabrese decades ago but he was NOT involved with the fabrication. Eventually, many of the movements started failing c. 2001 and the brand tried for nearly 2 years to repair ours. Finally, they said it would take SFr 10,000+ just to make the faulty component and gave up. We got the dead watch back and a free choice of any simple gold watch from their current (then 2003) catalogue.

In 2004, Dr Thomas Mao kindly introduced me to Mr Calabrese, who was winding down from accepting work but kindly agreed to help a fellow Purist. Of course, an AHCI founder could retro-engineer the faulty component (anchor pallet), by the power of the Mark I eyeball. He repaired the watch in 2 months but we could not make a trip to Switzerland until 2005 to collect it.

No - this is NOT the repaired watch but a stunt double

I am bound by agreement to the original manaufacturer not to reveal their identity, although I am impressed by their noble action to have offered a substitute watch more than a decade later....anyway.

Of course, one cannot just collect a repaired watch when at the atelier of one of the world's watchmakers to watchmakers............

We looked around.

We had spaghetti.

We drank a little Italian red wine.....er...a lot actually.

We collected another special watch that we had ordered back in 2004