Thursday, March 11, 2021

The jewels of your watch


 La Pierrette is a small great company making only one product, the Rubies for Swiss watches. Rubies are jewel bearing for precision tiny gear wheels inside a watch to reduce friction and hence to maintain good time keeping ability. This company is owned by Patek Philippe, Rolex and Richemont group, located in Vallee de Jous in Switzerland, having only 120 staff occupying 88,700 sq. foot factory space. Supplying 40-50 millions of rubies a year that could possibly be contained in in 2-3 1.5L jars! Each of the rubies or jewels are manufactured within precision of 2-3 microns.

Types of jewels in a watch

1. Hole jewel

2. Cap jewel

3. Pallet jewel

4. Roller jewel

Colour of jewel 

99% watch jewels is fuchsia, but RM is using black as they are more likely matching the skeleton movement design to look cool!  La Pierette had started this manufacturing in 1915... well that company can supply the rubies for these companies yearly consumption: Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet, Rolex, Panerai, Richard Mille, Omega. etc. 

Remarks : each manual winding watches contains 17 rubies, automatic watch has 21 jewels. RM-11 has 68 jewels and most complicated watches has  242 jewels. Each of the jewels having cost of a few Swiss frans! 

HK Snob

 

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