Back to Basics

Well I have pretty much neglected the blog full for the last 4 months or so. Nothing really worth talking about and well blogging is tedious and non-rewarding. But now that I have actually started to work on making a watch at WOSTEP, I suppose I should document it. So this will be the start of that. The blog will only be about that. I will make an honest attempt at updating once a week about the stuff I was able to do the past week. I started two weeks ago so this will be a double update. Here it goes.

Brief Background

The students at WOSTEP in Neuchatel are given the chance to make their own watch. None of the other WOSTEP schools in the past have had the opportunity to do this. However the school is trying to change this. This year the school decided to have their own custom designed "WOSTEP caliber W-01" The watches in the past were a pocket watch design and this one is no different. It is 40mm in diameter and very similar to the Unitas 6497. In fact it is pretty much the exact same watch but with a larger diameter and made with better materials and having a nicer finish.

Since the school decided to do this, we were also told that we would be limited in the freedom of customization to be done to the watch. This, along with the fact that I think pocket watches are dumb and completely useless led me to the decision to attempt to make another watch of which I would do whatever customizing I felt I could do. It will be a wristwatch and the movement is the base Unitas 6498-1 watch. This is what the watch looks like new. Of course there is a major time confliction considering we still have to do the WOSTEP school watch, along with actually learning watchmaking, and also doing another internship in January. Needless to say I will be putting in an extreme amount of hours to get all of these things done. But I think having a wristwatch I can actually wear and show to people will be much more rewarding than a pocket watch which will for surely collect dust in a box (no matter how nice I do make that one as well!) So with that said, the next posts are the first 2 weeks! I'll try to answer any questions about the stuff I'm doing...