Part IX - Pathological Stubbornness

It was June when I emailed last and a lot has happened…

In October my best friend of 12 years passed on. He was blessed with near perfect health throughout his life until a few weeks before leaving us when he was diagnosed with advanced cancer. He was there for me through all of the tough times, countless adventures and miles on the road. He was my home, my guide and always the best part of my day. I’m totally heartbroken but thankful that I got to spend nearly every one of his days giving him the best life I could. If you’d like to see just a few of his adventures and some of the friends he met along the way, his hashtag on instagram is #zeissers

When I last wrote I’d been planning on building the cases on a manual lathe and milling machine at a local maker space. I pushed that attempt about as far as was possible and finally decided that the equipment (and my abilities to coax accuracy out of them) were not up to my expectations for the watch which I wanted to make. This was a bit of a fork in the road for the project and one which, in hindsight, I should have considered more carefully. I could either stick with the manual machining of a watch for myself and maybe make a handful of timepieces for friends to cover the relatively low cost of the tools I’d bought or made so far. Or double down on the project and keep spending time and money on more equipment which would give me the ability to not only make my initial prototype watch, but future designs with greater accuracy and variances in design.

With the manual machined cases I was getting profile blanks for the watch cases water jet cut by an outside supplier and this locked me into the limitations of their equipment. It also hindered evolving a design and required far more tedious hand sanding, shaping and polishing to each piece. Fine for a small number of watches but very limiting for anything beyond that.

So I doubled down on the project and spent three months designing and building a CNC milling machine which was capable of holding the necessary tolerances and material needs of a quality timepiece. The result was a compact, extremely rigid machine built of steel and epoxy granite weighing in at around 600lbs which fits into a NYC brownstone basement. The machine will both drastically reduce the time needed to make parts, increasing accuracy and opens up the possibilities for future watch designs. There’s a gallery of the machine build here

That brings us back to actual watch making. In the past two weeks I’ve finally stopped building machine and started building watches. I’m still climbing the learning curve for the big machine and have whittled away countless bits of stainless in an effort to make a case. I don’t want to jinx myself but I think I’ve finally made most of the mistakes in tool speeds, feed rates and programming and reached the point late last night where I produced a case, to the exact design dimensions.

Whew.

So at long last, the production of my first edition of 9 watches is underway. After I finish this email I’m heading back to the shop to finish the first customer watch, number 6/9 which is heading out to my friend Lewis in Seattle. I’ll be sharing images of that on my new instagram @clementdesignstudios which gets more frequent updates on the the blood sweat and tears which go into building a watch.

Looking forward…

As I mentioned above I’ve now invested the better part of a year and every last cent I have into this project. And so the only way out is to keep going, or so I hope.

I love the idea of being able to make more limited edition watches to suit different needs and styles. I don’t know whether that’s a realistic vision or whether enough people would be interested in my horological art to keep this little venture going but I’ve got my fingers crossed. I was thinking that I’d model the watches for friends of mine, and then make a small batch of those. A double time zone watch for a frequent flyer, a lightweight, slim titanium edition for an aerialist dancer, a chronograph for a photographer who still develops their own film and needs a timer. And a watch with a high waterproofness for someone who lives on and in the water.

That’s the dream but for now I’m focused on getting this first edition finished and getting it out to the folks who bought one and have been encouraging me throughout this project to keep at it.

I’ll be building off the lessons learned in this first batch and with any luck, making the next set of watches in the new year.

Wishing you and your family a warm and merry holiday,

Giles