Sound of cowbell music

It really feels relaxing and mind healing to have the sound of cowbells with us when working. We hope the weather would be sunny like this instead of  raining and snowing.

I want to lay down like these cows. 

We are expected to finish most of our hand made tools before the first exam. Everyone push themselfs to finish all the work in time.

Felix is now working on his school watch prototype model. He designs and makes his own pocket watch. He makes his own fly cutter to produce his escape wheel. Woo~~that was fast. 

Yi-Ting practice operating the Agathon grinding machine to sharpen tungsten gravers for the lathes.

Stan grind graver with Agathon.

Agathon is one of Henrik's favorite machines. It is really time saving to grind the graver with a machine, but later we will have to learn how to manually grind a graver in the traditional way. We always learn things in both modern and traditional ways, which is good.

Sif focus on her delicate work pieces.

Shuai restoring a wrist watch from his friend. Restoration is a good way to gain experience and momentum for watchmaking.

CJ is drilling his pointed nose vice. 

Milling around

This week we have also been continuing our tool making, as we learn more and more about the machines it enables us to be  more creative and begin to think about aesthetics and how to achieve our design goals.

Milling has played a large part of that this week as we went deeper into the milling proceses and attachments, from milling on the lathe to different methods of holding our work such as complex vices. 

Felix has spent much of the week making screws of various sizes, materiels and design. 

The lathe milling attachment, endless posebilities!. 

Eddie has been working on some classical pocketwatches. here  he is evaluating the state of the parts looking for wear and other issues such as rust or previous poor repairs.

Shuai has been continuing his restoration of an Omega caliber 613. 

This week was made all the more special thanks to a lovely visit from Jack Kurdzionak, a fellow of the AWCI, watchmaker and now parts supplier for a wide variaty of watches. an incredibly passionate guy who had some great insight into being a watchmaker in America

 Here Felix and Yi ting were using the profile projector and finding some inconsistencies with the timing screws on this 200 year old balance wheel

Stan hard at work as the perpetual grind continues, and were glad of it!

Our first visit

Shuai is continuing work on his tourbillon. here he is dilling a hole on our beautiful jig boring machine for his escape bridge.

We took advantage of a chipped tungsten graver to learn the basics behind the Agathon machine.

Leon who is from Singapore, sharing his experience of starting his watch brand on kickstarter.
And how the marketing take the important place in selling watches, its a good lesson for us if we went to start our own brand in the future.



This week we began the lifelong process of practisisng our lathe skills.  The lathe is one of the most integral machines to watchmaking. watchmaking lathes comes in various forms, from the turns to the 8mm lathe to larger schaublin 102s. We decided to strike a middle ground and start with using the schaublin 70 and using just the cross slide.

On a beautiful sunny day here in  La chaux-de-fonds we went to visit a truly artisanal and independant casemaker and jewler. it was a very enlightening experience, His filing, machining and hand skills are truly impressive.

Mr. Mora

The lady bug watch with his patented design and mechanism.