This corporate project brings together artisans and apprentices in the group (Chopard and Chronométrie Ferdinand Berthoud) to pursue a common goal: ensuring that the art of watchmaking lives on. Going against the flow of the current tendency to automate and industrialise, the synergies formed are seeking to produce a timepiece using only traditional, manual techniques.

A workshop that’s been two years in the making



In projects like this, preparation takes at least as long as execution itself. Making a timepiece by hand involves bringing together the required skills, knowhow, and highly specific tools, many of which are obsolete nowadays.

The aim of the ‘Naissance d’une Montre’ project is to recover the legendary tricks of the trade and pass them on to today’s watchmakers, most of whom work on digitally-operated machines. The timepiece’s caliber is designed in line with the capabilities of legacy machines – rather than the other way round, as is the case in mass-produced contemporary watchmaking.

A bespoke facility

Historic tools and machinery have been installed in the Chopard Manufacture in Fleurier. Five pieces of equipment dating from the 1950s and 1960s have been brought together in a new venue designed to promote artisanal work: the ‘Hand Made’ space. Within this facility, at present wholly given over to the ‘Naissance d’une Montre 3’ project, Chronométrie Ferdinand Berthoud’s watchmakers and decorators rub shoulders with other Craftsmen practising arts such as enamelling and hand-engraving.

The equipment includes a 1960 Schaublin 102 Lathe, used to fashion circular components: shafts, fusees, pillars, pinions, gears, barrel drums, pins, winding stems, screws, and the like.

A 1960 SIP jig boring machine has been enlisted for boring, milling, drilling, grinding, and tapping operations on various components: rockers, levers, base plates, wheel platforms, bridges, and springs. The cutting tools include an Ewag machine with a diamond grinding wheel, to be used for the hardest materials.

For all the processes involved, the experts from the firm’s different departments will use only tools that are themselves also custom-built – and hand-made. An Aciera F3 milling machine will be used to produce and fit this equipment.