IT'S HERE!

 

Surely you remember the Straight-Line Guilloche machine fundraiser from late last year. Yes, thanks to your generous donations we have managed to keep the Guilloche machine in Australia. The machine has finally arrived to our factory from Adelaide in a massive crate, well protected and undamaged in transport. We are ready for the next step: cleaning, assembling, and fine-tuning. The excitement doesn't stop there. I have personally appointed a guardian who will supervise the project on your behalf. His name is Matt Howe, a subscriber to this mailing list. Why Matt? Because he is physically located around the corner from our Brookvale factory and he is also the nicest guy ever. I am convinced that Matt will protect your interests diligently. His duty is to report to you once a year that the machine is insured and in good working order. Stay tuned for more.

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.

Doing it the Wright way

Sheffield has been home to England's blade-making industry since the 14th century and is where stainless steel was originally invented in 1912. In the 1970's, there were 150 small-scale scissor workshops in Sheffield but now there are just two, one of which is Ernest Wright and Sons.

The Wright family have been involved in the boring, hardening and tempering of scissors since at least the 1800’s. As far back as records go, Walter Wright – a renowned ‘Little Mester’ of Sheffield – specialised in finishing scissor blades as an outworker and was also referred to as ‘Master Scissor Putter-togetherer’.

A scissor putter-togetherer is the title given to the holder of a five-year-to-fully-apprenticed skill set and trade, known and still used by our craftsmen today.

Since Walter Wright moved into the scissors industry, successive generations joined the trade. Walter’s son, Ernest, followed in his father’s footsteps to ultimately found the company in 1902. After him, Ernest Wright Jr and his sons Graham and Philip Wright all took their turn in running this family business. Finally, fifth generation scissor maker Nick Wright stepped in.

Cliff Denton is one of just two master putter-togetherers left. Both in their 70s, the masters are the only ones skilled enough to undertake the final delicate part of the process: the assembly of these scissors, or putting together.

However, after a short film called 'The Putter' featuring Cliff went viral in 2014, the business that had once been so slow that staff were only working two days a week, received two years’ worth of orders in a single day. Two years later in June 2016, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign for a throwback pair of kitchen scissors and ended up making four times their goal from more than 3600 backers.

Tragically, Nick Wright, the last of the Ernest Wright family, took his own life in February 2018, and wrote in a parting message “I tried so hard, this was no scam, I just could not make it happen. Too much pressure, not enough resource or time. I am so very genuinely sorry to you all.”

The light in the dark is that a pair of Dutch entrepreneurs have purchased and invested in the company, releasing this statement regarding their goal to 'Keep the Heritage Alive.'

When we acquired the assets of the company, there had been decades of decline and recent tragedy. The machinery was in neglect and although the workers had done all they could to keep the ship afloat, the heritage was slipping away.

To make sure that Ernest Wright continues to manufacture quality, handmade scissors, we’ve invested heavily in the workshop. By researching how to improve production, new machinery has been introduced that salutes the heritage and skill of our Putters. We’re working hard to keep the craft alive. Cliff Denton and Eric Stones, each with over 60 years’ worth of experience, are currently passing on their knowledge to new apprentices.

The Peak of Watchmaker Screw Manufacturing

***The Peak of Watchmaker Screw Manufacturing

The shiny tiny bit on the tip of my finger is a very special horological component. It is a screw. But what makes it special is the fact that it is one of the smallest screws in a watch mechanism. It comes from an Omega Flight Master manufactured in the 1970s and here is the curiosity: the screws you find in watches made today are not any better, shinier, more precise or even smaller. Watchmakers have been making such small screws for at least 200 years. And despite all the advances made in manufacturing technology, we reached the peak of screw making many decades ago.

Many visitors to our premises wonder why that big machine is sitting on the floor in the middle of the office. The answer: it’s awaiting its transfer to our newly built workshop. And what it does? Well the optical comparator allows us to see and measure the exact dimensions of even the smallest components like the above mentioned screw. And in laymen’s terms this screw is just over half a millimetre thick (or precisely, 600 microns), with the thread pitch of just 0.2mm. This 'piece of knowledge' is the very starting point in designing our own screws. Before we can draw and construct we must master the skill of taking precision measurements. And the beauty of our big machine is it can measure dimensions 10 times more precisely than we can even read.

The above screw as seen under the comparator. 

The CAD drawing of the same screw.

What an exciting journey!
 

Note from Laura, Nick's assistant: when I first saw the screw I didn’t even believe that it was a screw. It was explained to me that the purpose of it is to hold a tension spring attached to a barrel which also holds a small gear in a chrono-hour counter train. And here is the photo of the actual assembly showing two of those tiny screws doing their job.