A visit to Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta in Le Sentier
(c)12.2007,  Donald W. Corson

 

Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta are young brands, high end brands and brands that revel in complications.  To support their growth inside the Bulgari Group they have just completed the construction of a new modern factory building directly adjacent to their previous building which hails from 1905 (granite stairs, wrought iron railings, solid oak doors, built to last forever).  With the new building they are tripling the floor space dedicated to production, now 2800sq meters.

The "old" building:

and the new building, you can see the other behind it:

Built to the newest Swiss energy-saving standards using mostly local materials the story of the building itself is for another day.  Let's look at the capabilities housed in this new building.

For this visit I was guided by Mme. Anne-Lise Weistroff, Daniel Roth & Gérald Genta Responsible for Communications.  I was able to photograph everything and got answers to all the questions I could think of, stupid or otherwise.

New watch models at Daniel Roth & Gérald Genta start their life with a brief to the designers.  That starts the organising and structuring of ideas that then continues through the offices for artistic and mechanical design, prototyping, industrialisation and on into production. At each step the design engineers work together with the watchmakers and other craftsmen to make unique watches that are dependable and that are also producible.

Using CAD programs that are specialised for the needs of watchmaking the pieces can not only be designed, but their movements and interactions controlled and corrected in iterative, interactive steps.

After its first incarnation on the computer a new design has to prove its stuff on 100 prototypes.  These prototypes are made in batches of 10, each batch incorporating the improvements found necessary in the previous batch. 

Here are several series of prototype plates just after the CNC

The CNC milling machine below is used for making the plates and bridges:

The machine can automatically change its cutting tools.  This is the cutting tool carousel.  Each tool is specific for a certain operation.

But even using fully automatic tools some work still needs to be done by hand.  Here the drilling of the holes for the stem on a Hauser M1 with milling attachment.

Below a movement plate is being controlled for dimensions before starting off a series.

Each hole and recess is a different tool that can be/needs to be adjusted to assure the piece is perfect.

Another important machine in the D&G workshop is the wire electro-erosion machine.  This machine cuts by eroding the surface with electrical arcs, sparks.  This has tremendous advantages as there are no forces exerted on either the tool or the work-piece.  This allows using very fine wire as the cutter, 0.1mm is common, which allows cutting sharp internal corners. 

As no forces are exerted on the work-piece it is also relatively easy to cut very fine structures, such as the tourbillon cage in the picture below.

After this visit to the machine shop my visit continued with a long look at the ateliers for decoration. 

Below are several examples of the work of the perlage & côtes de Genève atelier.  As I noticed reviewing my pictures, I was so busy looking at the results that I forgot to take pictures of the people doing the work.  This picture has many examples of plates for both Daniel Roth and Gérald Genta movements.  Gérald Genta's typical decoration is all perlage, while the Daniel Roth movements are decorated with the more conservative and distinguished looking côtes de Genève.

Next step: Anglage atelier.

Here we see the anglage being done on a movement bridge.  Anglage using wooden disks as here is relatively quick, but requires tremendous skill.  The material is removed quickly, one little hesitation, too much is removed and the piece is ruined.

For the more complicated pieces such as skeletonised movements the anglage is done without rotating tools. Below see a DR skeletonised tourbillon plate in work.

The anglage for this movement takes about 50 hours for an experienced angleur. 

The atelier for anglage also works on steel parts such as the springs, the repetition chimes and as can be seen here, the tourbillon bridges.  Here the tourbillon bridge as they receive it, left, and its condition when it leaves their atelier:

 

At this point we step out of the machine shop and part preparation area and head up the stairs to the watchmaker's workshops on the next floor.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is only a temporary solution and is actually there just to remind us of the very recent move into this building.

To be continued in part 2:  CLICK HERE

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