|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
A Visit to Lange & Söhne (Part 1)Posted by Jack Forster
Night flight to Germany. Last month I was invited to tour the Lange & Söhne manufactory in Glashütte and needless to say responded "yes" with alacrity. The trip though relatively short was absolutely full --overnight to Frankfurt, then a hop to Dresden, check in at the Hotel Bülow Palais. . . then the next day, drive to Glashütte for a morning at the manufactory, a guided tour of Dresden's Old City, then the next day a flight by chartered private jet to Salzburg for an evening at the Salzburg Music Festival. I had never before been to German, nor to the Lange manufactory and needless to say I regarded the trip with considerable anticipation (also a little anxiety as I speak no German except for a half dozen words of little everyday practical use, like doppelfederhaus  ).
Also had never been on a 747 before and was delighted to find that my seat was right up in the nose cone, under the cockpit bulge. Certainly if the plane had struck anything nose first I never would have known what hit me. Anyway, the flight was totally uneventful and Lufthansa business class is very enjoyable and efficient. The pic of my 747 was taken through the window of the Lufthansa business lounge at JFK. 
Arrived after about ten hours of traveling at my hotel for the duration in Dresden, the Bülow Palais. 
Nothing feels better than getting into a nice hotel room after traveling for the better part of a day. As someone who does the lion's share of the housework when I'm home I always feel especially pleased to know that for the next couple of days I can leave things like making up the beds and clearing up the dinner dishes to someone else  .
Self-portrait in wardrobe mirror. 
Bar area, also a sight for sore eyes  .
I was joined at dinner by my dear friend, comrade-in-arms, and colleague Elizabeth Doerr, as well as Christian Englebrecht the international PR director for Lange & Söhne. We dined at the Caroussel Restaurant and may I say it was one of the more spectacularly prolonged, varied and interesting gastronomic entertainments I have ever had. I think we took at least two hours over dinner --maybe more --with a couple of different wines and about six or seven courses. . . time has dimmed my recollection of the specifics but we segued gracefully from fish to game somewhere around the fourth course, and the wine changed, and then we had a couple of dessert courses and then a nightcap at the bar. Ms. Doerr and I went for a long and somewhat guilty walk the next morning. We strolled as it happens over the Elbe River upon whose banks the city of Dresden, which is the capital of the Free State of Saxony, is built, and wandered through the Old City a little bit while the town woke up around us. It was unseasonably chilly and it rained pretty much on and off the entire time we were there but the gloom did little to dampen my excitement. We returned to find Christian and some colleagues from Japan joining us. . . 
Left, Christian, center, Mr. Hironori Dohi, Ms. Junko Kitazaki, Marketing Manager for Richemont Ltd. (Japan) and Elizabeth Doerr. 
The drive to Glashütte isn't long --somewhere between a half hour and forty five minutes or so. The entire area is pretty rural once you get outside Dresden proper --Dresden is pretty close to the border with Czechoslavakia and Glashütte is even closer, only about five miles or so before you are across the border. Glashütte is someplace that should be on any watch fancier's list of must-see places. In addition to Lange, there are of course a number of other firms located there, and virtually all of the citizens of Glashütte either work in the watch industry or in a supporting industry. There are only a few thousand inhabitants and it's a pretty fair bet that if you run into a working-age adult from Glashütte he or she knows how to use a tweezers and a screwdriver. As many of you know the watchmaking industry was nationalized during the Socialist era, under the flag of VEB Glashütte Uhrenbetriebe (1951) which became Glashütte Uhrenbetriebe GmbH after the reunification. Lange & Söhne's history is part of the complex history of watchmaking in this region as well and the story is well known but worth certainly touching on the high points again: founded by Ferdinand Adolph Lange in 1845, the firm was known for its high precision, high grade pocketwatches and even up to the beginning of WW II concentrated much of its energy on making pocket watches and chronometers in the high Saxon watchmaking style. In 1948 the firm's property and equipment were expropriated and Lange & Söhne ceased to exist as an independent firm. However, after the German re-unification, Walter Lange, great-grandson of Ferdinand Adolph Lange, along with Günter Blümlein re-established the firm, showing its first collection of watches in 1994. The Lange family has watchmaking in its blood going back many generations, even Ferdinand Adolph Lange's wife, Antonia Gutkaes was the daughter of Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes, a prominent Saxon clockmaker who was attached to the Saxon court and responsible for the palace tower clock. 
Arriving at the headquarters of Lange & Söhne. . . 
The front door. . .
Bust of the founder in the vestibule. 
One of the relatively few decorative flourishes is this oversized model in the lobby of the movement of a Datograph. . . 
. . . showing some of the classic features of Lange & Söhne watchmaking including the hand engraved balance cock, whiplash regulator spring, chatons for the movement jewels held in place with blued steel screws, and of course the generally extremely high level of finish for which Lange & Söhne is renowned. Rather than the more common rhodium plated brass Lange & Söhne constructs its watches from so called German silver (also known as maillechort) which requires no plating but is demanding to work with as it scratches and stains easily requiring extra care to be taken during fabrication and assembly. 
As with virtually all watchmaking done today the story of a Lange & Söhne watch begins with the use of high precision computer controlled milling and cutting machines for the initial steps of movement component fabrication. While it's tempting to refer to this as "roughing out" there is actually nothing rough about it and the achievement of repeatably high precision production of components was one of watchmaking's holy grails in the mid to late 19th century. 
CNC machine at work. . . 
This gentleman is checking the height of different levels of the movement blank with a digital micrometer. There is as you might expect from Lange & Söhne pretty fanatical quality control at every stage of manufacture and assembly. This interestingly enough manifests itself as an almost leisurely pace of work but in fact the somewhat measured pace of progress at Lange & Söhne is a natural consequence of the prioritizing of quality over speed of production at every stage of the creation of a watch. 
Movements are also checked on an optical comparator. . . 
. . . and against what I surmise to be a sort of optical micrometer; this was actually a pretty amazing piece of equipment. The green lines overlying the part being checked enclose are only about two microns across (if I remember correctly) which is rather fantastic; for comparison a human red blood cell is about five microns in diameter (very approximately.) As you can see from the image the deviation from specification is almost nil. The sample being examined sits on a granite bed that floats on a cushion of air in order to provide an absolutely stable and vibration free mount for the micrometer. 
Extremely small parts .
Before components can be sent on to the next stages of manufacturing, where they'll be finished, assembled, adjusted and cased, they have to be cleaned. Nothing like a bath in good old benzene to get the job done. Note the use of the extremely high tech paper towels as blotting material .
Next area required us to don white coats. Above, Elizabeth and Christian. . . 
. . . and Elizabeth and me. I like traveling with Elizabeth, especially in Germany; she speaks fluent German having lived there for many years and it certainly was helpful when going through the Lange & Söhne manufactory as many of the staff don't speak much English (though most of them spoke a hell of a lot more English than I do German.) 
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what most of the rest of the Lange & Söhne manufactory looks like. Row after row of benches in absolutely quiet rooms filled with people finishing and assembling watches by hand. I've never been to a manufactory before where there seemed to be such a high proportion of manually executed work relative to what's being done by machine. Basically once you get off the floor where the CNC, spark erosion, and computer guided quality control equipment is located you might be back in the late 19th century. It's really spectacular to see so many people at their benches working with such a high level of skill and engagement with their work, and you can tell that the people who work here take a LOT of pride in what they do. It's easy to understand why when you consider the history of Glashütte in general and the history of Lange & Söhne in particular; these are people who have maintained a local tradition of watchmaking against pretty incredible odds during a fantastically difficult period that is well within recent memory for many, and you get a tremendous sense when you visit Lange & Söhne that everyone there feels justly proud of the role they've played in resurrecting the high German watchmaking tradition. 
This watchmaker is applying beveling to a steel lever which is part of a perpetual calendar mechanism (again if memory serves correctly.) It's traditional in watchmaking for much of what in the Franco-Swiss tradition is called finissage to be done by women, who are regarded as having more aptitude for the work --the general opinion is that women have steadier hands and more patience! 
Tools of the trade. . . 
I have never really gotten over being amazed at the sight of someone manually finishing components this small. . . 
. . . I don't think there is any doubt that it takes a special kind of personality and a very unique kind of self-discipline to spend your professional life manually finishing components this tiny! 
Spec sheet for the part in question. . . 
Next stop was the engraving atelier. The process of engraving the balance cock in a Lange & Söhne watch is fascinating to watch and the end result one of the most distinctive elements of Lange & Söhne timepieces; cases can also be engraved to create unique pieces and commissions for custom engraving work are accepted as well. 
Engraver's tools. 
The manufactory has a camera set up through the binocular microscope the engraver uses so you can watch him in action. I was reminded, watching the swift, deft and sure movements of the gentleman engraving a balance cock that morning, of another unforgiving freehand technique I saw a few years ago, on a visit to the Steuben Glass factory here in the USA in upstate New York. The process of engraving glass looks easy when you watch an expert do it but then they let you try it yourself on a piece of scrap glass and you see just how demanding it is --since the engraving tool (a spinning copper disk) is stationary and you have to move the workpiece, it's rather like trying to do a drawing by moving the paper instead of the pen, only the paper weights several pounds and you can't go back over mistakes. Likewise engraving the balance cock requires coordinated movements of both hands and there is no room for error. The next sequence of photos shows the engraver in action. . . 
And the finished products, each done by hand and ready to become a unique visual flourish in a Lange & Söhne watch. 
In the watchmaker's changing room, there's a regulator dial pendulum clock on the wall --I think it's a seconds pendulum --which was made by four students from the Lange & Söhne watch and clockmaking school. . . 
We next visited the area where final assembly of movements takes place. Lange & Söhne is famous for actually assembling each movement twice --during the first assembly the entire movement is cleaned, assembled and oiled and all functions checked, including accuracy and rate stability --then the entire movement is broken down again, cleaned, re-oiled and reassembled before being cased and finally released from the factory. It is a laborious process but the result is that Lange & Söhne watches are praised by many owners not only for their generally irreproachable performance but also for much better accuracy than many other mechanical watches. Nonetheless the creation of a Lange & Söhne watch is a time consuming process; from start to finish, even a relatively simple watch like the Lange 1 takes, we were told, about six months to create. 
There is a separate smaller area for the assembly of high complications. During our visit we saw the final stages in the assembly of a Tourbograph. . . 
Fusee chain. . . 
Movement of a Lange & Söhne Double Split. 
Lange & Söhne is one of the few manufactories which not only manufactures most of the components of its watches in house, but also has the capacity to make its own hairsprings. The reason many manufacturers don't is because making consistently reliable hairsprings is very technically challenging; miniscule variations in physical dimensions or chemical properties can cause disproportionately dramatic variability in the performance of the final product and so the vast majority of watch manufacturers are more than happy to source their hairsprings from third party suppliers with this additional capacity. Essentially the process involves taking the initial raw stock (a wire made of a nickel steel alloy --in the case of Lange & Söhne, obtained from a German supplier) and drawing it through a series of progressively smaller dies until the requisite diameter is reached. This extremely fine wire is then run through a roller which flattens it out into the final ribbon of steel from which the hairspring is made. Above is the final machine for rolling out the flattened wire and below is one of the dies used for drawing out the wire. 
The wire comes off this spool. . . 
. . .down and around this guide. . . 
. . . through the rollers, and emerges as a flat, very fine ribbon of steel. . . 
. . . its thickness and width are checked by a laser micrometer. . . 
. . . and here is the result: a very fine wire of as uniform a shape and chemical properties as possible. Even so there are always slight variations in the dimensions and chemical properties of each batch, so each batch is matched to balances which are the best possible fit in terms of the moment of inertia of the balance and the elasticity of the hairsprings. 
Here is the man responsible for hairspring production at Lange & Söhne: Mr. Reiner Kocarek (right) with Christian, left. Mr. Kocarek was kind enough to explain the entire process to Elizabeth and myself with translation provided by Elizabeth and Christian (note to self: buy German textbook tomorrow. No, today!) Mr. Kocarek's card just says "Technologie" but I was told his title, approximately, is "Engineer for Precision Mechanics." I asked him how Lange & Söhne had developed their hairspring manufacturing abilities --after all as an engineer at another of the few manufactories with that capability once remarked to me drily, "It's not as if you can just walk over to Nivarox and ask them how they do it." Mr. Kocarek's answer was to show us his watch. I was naturally expecting a Lange & Söhne timepiece but in fact, it's a watch made by his previous employer: 
This is a GUB "Spezimatic" which was given to him as his 10 year watch during his tenure with them. Naturally in order for a VEB ("People's Company") to make watches it would have had to have the ability to make hairsprings as well and it was there that he learned the basic engineering principles and technologies necessary. The watch as well as Mr. Kocarek thus embody a remarkable period in the history of German watchmaking when nationalization of the Glashütte watch companies notwithstanding certain key capabilities were retained and which now allow this vital skill, among others, to continue in the center of German watchmaking. 
To help us understand the need for extreme precision in manufacturing hairsprings Mr. Kocarek showed us this specifications sheet, which shows the number of minutes per day variation that certain variations in physical dimensions can cause. Note for instance that as minute a variation as 0.1 microns can cause a rate variation of up to three minutes per day. 
Lange & Söhne's expertise in hairspring manufacturing is available to other manufacturers in the Richemont Group as well. This is a cylindrical hairspring, which is fitted to an extremely exotic, award winning multi-axis tourbillon created by one of Lange & Söhne's Richemont stablemates. No prizes for guessing what watch this goes into .
Finally back at the locker room we changed out of our lab coats to continue our tour. Even the hangers were solidly overbuilt expressing the core Lange & Söhne values stay tuned for Part 2. . .Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/25/2010 06:25PM by Jack Forster.
come back when reading your very nice report. Have been there several times and still can/love to learn new things.
Thanks for sharing Part 1 and looking forward Part 2 
Oliver
Hi Jack,
Brilliant report mate! Retrospectively, quite a few surprises as to the intricacies regarding the hairspring manufacturing. An awesome task indeed. I am amazed at the candor of the gentleman producing the same, which few nuances exist mind, at this level of watchmaking, it should be understood and even glorified. There are very few watch companies that make their own hairsprings- let alone a process that is slowly but surely being tossed out of the window in most ateliers in Switzerland. Seriously, this is a revelation that adds more meat to your reporting. Reglage was the epitome of the watch industry- not so much today! I am eagerly awaiting the pt.2 as you mention, hasta la vista..or should I say 'Gesundheit'
Prem C. Specialist watchmaker- SAV Communications expert
|
|||||||||||||||
