Super special

 

There is a big difference between retail business and manufacturing business. In retail, only one in a hundred happy customers would take the care to leave feedback. Why bother? A smooth transaction and the watch arriving 'as described' is expected. But when you are manufacturing a part for an engineer, you can be assured that feedback is guaranteed. Typical feedback is: "Part arrived, tested and fitted into assembly, works. Now, we are redesigning, see attached drawing for changes." The engineer's job is simply to keep improving, making it better and making it (whatever that is) more efficient. For them, NH Micro is seen as a crucial and valuable partner in a complex project which involves a number of participants.  Apart from making watches, we offer our high-precision contract manufacturing capabilities to companies that make satellites, in-space propulsion systems, medical devices, optical and mechanical scientific instruments, quantum computers. Smart people, on the cutting edge in their field. A couple of weeks ago, we delivered an assembly to the Institute for Astronomy, Hawaii. IfA employs over 150 astronomers and support staff. IfA astronomers perform research into Solar System objects, stars, galaxies and cosmology. Our client was the department that builds instrumentation for telescopes. The parts they had for us to manufacture were extremely difficult, and presented a large technical challenge for us to execute. Simply, the assembly that we were making is an opto-mechanical filter, which was to work within the spectrum analysing equipment of their telescope. Light from stars that had travelled across the galaxy would hit the mirrors of the telescope, through fibre optic cables and would pass through our device, before being recorded and analysed in a computer. Small physical imperfections in the parts that we were making would present large problems further down the chain, and therefore the parts had to be held to incredibly tight tolerances!  Here is a drawing we can share with you:

The filter is made from Grade 5 titanium (the same material as the MK2 dial!). The shape of the parts was crucial. We made multiple discs, only 2mm thick, featuring some rather crazy tolerances. The angular tolerance was +-0.01degrees, and the thickness of the rings needed to be within +-5 microns! The combination of both of these geometric tolerances was the real difficulty. The feedback arrived promptly: “Hi Josh We’ve had the tube for about a few days now and I’ve put a few hours in the lab getting it set up with our testbed; it's been great! I’ve attached a PDF of the results I have so far in the lab. ... Thank you and your team for the excellent workmanship on these parts; this will be a key piece in the upgraded instrument design, improving our efficiency on the telescope by a factor of ~4. We’re really impressed... “ We also got attached a little slideshow of our parts in action, as well as an image of a star passing through the filter we had made. If you are an engineer yourself, then you would fully appreciate how challenging this project was. You would also appreciate that most machinists would simply reject to get involved in the first place; when it comes to making a part for scientific instruments of this calibre, the results can not be faked. And not only did we get it right, we’ve managed to get it so right, so close to the theoretical calculation, that the efficiency of the telescope was improved by factor of 4! Manufactured in Brookvale, Australia. Our books are open: the next batch of Mark II watches should be ready for delivery in May. Your order is welcome: join the small and exclusive club, become an ambassador, wear a watch made by a small team of Australian watchmakers and machinists who are pushing the limits of what is physically possible.