Building a Watch From Scratch in a Brooklyn Basement
Giles Clement tends to go a little overboard with his hobbies. During the pandemic, he taught himself to repair old watches and then decided to try building one himself. Taylor Scott Mason made a short documentary about Clement and his effort to build a watch from scratch in his basement:
Aside from the movement, Clement builds every component of his watches completely from scratch. He even constructed two of his milling machines and designed the typeface for the numbers on the watch face.
My shop is built around two 3 axis CNC machines which I built from scrap steel, surplus parts and a bunch of cussin. The larger of the two has an epoxy granite frame which gives a sturdy platform for cutting titanium and stainless cases, case backs and crowns. The smaller machine sports a 100k RPM spindle and the ability to cut extremely fine details needed for the hands and dials.
I’ve also built a pad printing machine for dials a polishing lathe, a lume injector for hand and dial applications and several drawers full of jigs and fixtures needed to manufacture parts.
You can read more about Clement’s process on his website and buy one of his watches from his online shop. Prices start at $2250.
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Person making everything by hand is my favorite category of KDO post
The next time someone asks you what vertical integration is, send them a link to this video. :-) What a lovely tribute to creativity without arbitrary limits.
This really hit. Just beautiful and inspiring.
We're gonna need this guy when society collapses.
Did not expect my love for mechanical watches to cross over to KDO! Thanks for posting this!
I wasn’t planning on watching the whole thing, just previewing before sharing it with some watch lovers I know. Then I was pleasantly surprised by how self-aware and self-deprecating he was, and not just a quiet, dry engineering type. He’s the sort of guy I can root for.
I wonder how he will mentally deal with being a producer of watches (repeating his step by step process, over and over and over). A very different type of challenge than inventing!
Yeah, I am not a watch person at all (I have an Apple Watch I only wear when exercising) but really liked this video.
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