Thursday, January 30, 2020

Manufactured in Brookvale

We are excited! This week we reached another important milestone with NH2... the guilloche of timascus! 'Guilloché' is a decorative technique reserved exclusively for the decoration of brass watch dials using a stationary cutting tool moved over the surface creating trenches and grooves. The more detailed the design, the more eye-catching the pattern is. It goes without saying that even the smallest imperfection would stand out like a sore thumb. There are only a handful of dial makers who 'do guilloche' in the traditional way.

Our guilloche is created using a high precision, modern CNC mill. We use much smaller tools that can be turned between 40 to 50 thousand rpm. This allows for not just much finer grooves but we can guilloche extremely hard materials like Titanium and Timascus; and decorate not just a dial but all internal watch components! The end result is simply amazing. The combination of three timascus alloys; the uniqueness of the colours; and the accuracy of each pass of the cutting tool; and the intricacy of the pattern means our guilloche looks more like a hologram than a ‘three dimensional’ surface. The grooves are so fine that they feel more like a smooth glass surface under your finger.

The first prototypes are in the workshop as we speak, and we expect to have the first fully decorated bridges ready to be assembled in around three months. I wish I could disclose more, but at this stage I would not want for this to be copied by the Swiss or the Chinese!     
                 

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