Inside a Mechanical Watch: How Springs, Gears and Escapements Really Work, Harman asks if I can see the dial. I say yes, rather promptly for someone who cannot.
I can see the Richard Mille’s numerals and the movement beneath them. “Where are the indices sitting on?” he asks. Under the hour markers is a sheet of sapphire so clear I have been looking straight through it. Harman is explaining the difficulty of making it. I am trying to find its edge.
The watch is an RM 023. At The Repair Hub in Delhi, Harman has agreed to open it for me, along with a Vacheron Constantin and an Audemars Piguet. He puts the RM’s value at roughly Rs 1.2 crore, depending on condition and paperwork. I look again.
The crown turns so smoothly that I ask whether the watch needs a service. It has gone ten years without one, Harman says. He gives me another movement to wind; this one has a drag I can feel. Its barrel has been removed, so this is not a fair test of one watch against another. The RM’s ease tells him little about its accuracy or power reserve. A timegrapher checks a watch’s beat in different positions, giving him numbers where my fingers can only guess.
Now Harman turns the RM over. “See, it’s white gold,” he says. “If I do slip a bit…”
The screwdriver meets the case. I can see how little metal lies between its blade and a permanent mark. Harman holds the tool near its neck, where his fingers can control it; he learned the grip during his formal Swiss training at K&H Watchmaking Competence Centre in Le Locle. A blade too small for the screw would turn it and damage the slot. He has chosen wooden tweezers for the coated titanium inside because metal could leave a trace. The back comes off. For a moment I have all the access I wanted and no idea where to look.
“What justifies that price?” I ask.
“It’s never one thing.” He shows me the rotor, a weight that turns as its owner moves. Its white-gold ribs can be repositioned to adjust the winding to the wearer’s activity; a tungsten-alloy weight sits at the rim, ceramic bearings at the centre. The rotor turns gears that wind mainsprings in two barrels. The crown can wind them too. The springs store the energy that will turn the watch’s hands, whether I understand what I am seeing or not.
Harman takes the RM’s hands towards midnight to show me the date. I raise my phone. A blue reflection takes over the image. “Can you go back?” He does. I ask again. A wheel moves, something loads, and a spring lets go: the numeral jumps. We change the angle and try once more. Even the date gets its moment of energy from the winding springs.
There is one thing I do not understand. If a spring is trying to unwind, why do the wheels not race until it is empty?
Harman reaches for a separate movement. “See what I do once I remove the pallet fork.”
It is already wound. He points to the barrel, the connected wheels, the escape wheel. The pallet fork’s two ruby-tipped faces alternately hold and release its teeth. Beside it, a balance swings, drawn back each time by a fine hairspring.
The fork gives the balance a push; the balance determines when the next tooth may go. With every release, the wheels advance a little, and so do the hands. Then Harman lifts the fork away.
The train runs.
It happens fast enough to make his explanation physical. The mainspring had this energy all along; the fork was stopping it from leaving at once. “The power has been released,” Harman says. I look at the tiny piece in his tweezers. Put it back, and all that stored force can be spent one beat at a time. This is what the RM is doing while it lies open between us.
Harman pauses over a Patek Philippe Cubitus brought in for repair. Then he sets down a rare platinum Vacheron Constantin Ultra-Thin, ref. 34070, and opens its back. “Oh my gosh,” I say.
Its hand-wound Calibre 1160 is 1.2 millimetres thick. I had wanted to see how anyone could fit a movement into so little height. Now I can barely find it. Harman turns the watch on its side under the loupe. “It’s like paper,” I tell him.
“You don’t see it,” he says.
“I don’t see it.”
There is no rotor; I would wind this watch by its crown alone. But the mainspring still drives wheels towards an escapement. None of those essentials has vanished. Every fraction of their height has had to be argued for. The design descends from Jean Lassale’s Calibre 1200, whose miniature ball bearings allowed some wheels to be supported from one side, doing away with bridges above them.
“Look at the spokes of this.” Harman points to the balance. One spoke steps down so another part can sit lower. Without that step, the bridge would rise; the 1.2-millimetre movement might have been 1.35. I ask him to show me again. We try to photograph what the loupe reveals, closer, from the side, without losing the thinness. “It’s remarkable,” he says. He is still excited by the space the watchmaker found decades ago.
Somebody else has been here since. The Vacheron passed through two or three workshops before it reached Harman, keeping erratic time. He shows me a mark that should not be there. Its pivots are minute. “What if it falls down?”
“God bless you.” Then he adds that it depends on the fall. I think of his screwdriver against the RM’s gold
The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Selfwinding Chronograph, ref. 26237ST.OO.1000ST.01, arrives with enough steel for both watches. This 2018 re-edition recalls the huge 1993 original nicknamed “the Beast”. Harman lifts its back; I lean in and cannot see the chronograph I came looking for. It sits beneath the dial. Its Calibre 3126/3840 contains 365 components and measures 7.16 millimetres thick, almost six times the Vacheron’s movement. A Dubois Dépraz module takes power from the automatic movement to run a stopwatch without stopping the time.
But what moves when I press the pusher? Harman explains. I ask to see it. “You have to imagine a bit,” he says. Someone asks about lunch. Later, he brings out an
exposed Valjoux 7750. On this separate movement, one press engages the chronograph wheels. Another stops them while the watch continues to run. Reset sends little hammers against heart-shaped cams, bringing the indications to zero. No hands are fitted. At last I can watch the wheels.
After the AP, Harman is talking about how to pick up a part without scratching it. The Vacheron bears the evidence of someone less careful. “I know the customer is not going to see that scratch,” he says. “But still. Why?”