Harry Winston

Dear PuristS,

While I don’t have any of Harry Winston’s Opus watches, I have always admired the collaborative work that Max Busser and HWRT undertook with these watchmakers. I was looking at the back of the Opus 5 today (well, at least a picture of it), and contemplating the 5-year service indicator.

Just out of interest, can anyone tell me what service arrangements there are for these watches? Would they go back directly to the Atelier of the original watchmaker? When out of warranty, would they still go through Harry Winston? Unfortunately most of us are not located near a HW Boutique, so I am just wondering about the ease of arranging servicing.

Regards

Andrew

HWRT is already developing a facility in Geneva at the moment.

Also, the Opus watches can be fixed/repaired by the AHCI or future watchmakers like most mechanical watches.

It is first a matter of diagnosis, and then either realignment or cleaning in most cases. In rarer cases of actual damage to internal parts by mishandling, then refabrication or replacement of the part will be done. This will either be a spare which will be most likely available as potentially breakable parts were anticipated and provided for, such as whips, springs or clicks, but unusual parts that were not anticipated, like a wheel or cog , these may have to be recut, if spares are not already fab and stored.

Most of the watches we speak of, from Opus, already have a certain number of spares on standby in store.

Note that as fabrication technology improves, it will be possible to cut/machine a small part at some cost in the future.

Unlike combustion engines, our watch parts do have a more "fixable" quality than say a unique piston or valve in a petrol engine, both can be fixed by fabricating a new part, but the watch part is more tolerable to minute  differences/errors as we don't have to deal with gas and heat loss.

Hope this is reassuring.

Thanks Bernard, yes that’s reassuring.

I know from your comments at Tempus that you believe micro-part manufacturing will become easier and ‘cheaper’ in the future so yes, it’s nice to know that our timepieces will continue long after we are gone. Not sure my kids know what burden I am putting on them with my watch collection though; perhaps this is a reasonable price for all those sleepless nights and nappy changes!

The other issue is watchmaker training and expertise and I guess I would have been happier if ‘my’ Opus Five went back to Felix or ‘my’ Opus One to Francois-Paul and their teams for service. Provided HWRT are putting appropriate resources and trained staff into their new Geneva facility, then that sounds great.

Kind regards as always

Andrew