Waiting for us were Nicoletta Merlini of Blancpain’s offices near Lausanne and Monsieur. Tieche, head watch maker, in Le Brassus. 

In every respect this building represents the roots of the company. When Jean-Claude Biver founded the modern company in the early 80’s not only was this the company’s workshop, this was his house! He and the watchmakers worked downstairs; when mealtime came there would be a rapping on the ceiling from above telling him to come upstairs to where he lived.

Blancpain has two workshops, this one in Le Brassus and another in Paudex. Le Brassus is reserved for the most complicated watches—the tourbillons, the repeaters and the legendary 1735 grand complication. The remainder of the line is made in Paudex. There is one common thread to both locations and the entire line. One watch maker assembles the movement beginning to end. I can’t think of another comparably sized Swiss manufacturer which can make the same claim to following this old Vallee de Joux tradition.

For our first stop on the tour, M. Tieche showed us the system followed for the complicated Le Brassus watches. The readers of this forum know that Blancpain and the movement company Frederic Piguet are very tightly linked. Both companies are jointly owned and both are managed by Jean-Claude Biver. Blancpain and Piguet collaborated closely on the conception and design of the movements used in the Blancpain line. In every meaningful respect, Blancpain can be seen as a “manufacturer” with what can fairly be represented as “in-house” movements. One interesting story illustrates this very well. The base movement for Blancpain’s chronographs is the 1185. From the very beginning the conception of this movement was a joint project. Blancpain and Piguet jointly set out to engineer a movement that would be both traditional and revolutionary at the same time. It would be traditional in that it would adopt a column wheel design for the control and co-ordination of the chronograph functions ( a principle that sadly has not been respected for the vast majority of chronograph movements which populate the market). 

It would be revolutionary however in several ways. First it would be thin. Blancpain and Piguet established a design criteria that as an automatic movement, not only would it be thinner than every other automatic chronograph movement in the industry, it would be thinner than any manual wind chronograph movement ! Second it would be designed in a way that the chronograph could be run constantly if one wished. Intuitively this does not sound significant but it is. Even the best pre-existing chronograph movements were built on the opposite principle. They were designed for use with the chronograph stopped !  Amplitude of the watch was optimized with the chronograph stopped and the watch was regulated for that condition. Indeed, even the most expensive chronographs, then and now, come with warnings against leaving the chronograph running all the time. Blancpain and Piguet designed their movement so that the amplitude would be correct with the chronograph running and engaged. Finally, the movement was conceived for smooth starting and stopping. That meant a clutch for engagement, rather than the older methods which dropped two gears onto each other with the common result of a “jump” of the chronograph seconds hand. These key design goals and approaches were the product of the work of both companies together.

The basic manufacturing of the parts takes place at Piguet. On arrival the parts, as shown in the photo are either in blanks or are already cut out. In both cases, the first step for the watch makers in Le Brassus is to apply a second finish to the parts. This would be anglage to many parts and polishing of gears etc. Continuing in overview, the watch maker then proceeds to assemble the watch and once the watch is working correctly, disassemble the watch, applies the final finish and polish to the parts, and reassembles the watch again.

The left picture shows a part cut out with a spark erosion machine, according to Monsieur Tieche, these are manufactured by a third party, specialist company. 

This is a very tricky business. Each of these watches is unique. At this level of complication, the parts from one watch cannot be interchanged with another watch of the same model. No matter how precisely the parts were produced the tolerances are so small (as little as a 100th of a millimeter) and the finish adjustments of the watch maker so fine and subtle that interchange cannot be assured.

Usually before the production run is started for a movement that is to be made in large series, the design team's prototypist goes to work. His job is to assemble the movement out of unadjusted parts and give feedback to the production team in regard to which parts could be optimized in what way so that the assembly process becomes quicker and easier and needs less individual adjusting. In some cases, this can mean cutting the assembly time of a complicated movement in half. In the case of the 1735, I doubt that very much of this kind of prototyping was done, the final product is more or less a custom-made watch.

Shown in this photo is a tourbillon cage assembly—consisting of the cage itself, the balance wheel and the escapement. 

The watch maker explained to us that he had been working on this assembly for three days and, for a reason that he had not figured out, it was not yet functioning correctly. Indeed, when we saw him he was in a state of vexation - having built and torn apart this assembly seven times already in the proceeding three days. Somewhere an adjustment to the parts was required; he hadn’t yet figured out where. I am sure when he solved the problem and finished with this cage, what he did to it to get it to work, would not apply to the next tourbillon that he would set out to build. Remarkable as well in this vignette is the fact that no one was pushing him to meet a production schedule. He was working on the problem at his pace and would simply get it done. 

I felt real sympathy for the gentleman dealing with the defective tourbillon cage, imagine, working for three days on the same tiny little piece. We conversed in our native Swiss German, so for once, I totally understood what was going on. He had built a series of  ten tourbillions, two eventually came back for repair and this was one of them. At Blancpain, any imperfection committed in the past will eventually come to haunt you as the maker of a watch is also responsible for servicing it. And this one turned out to be a full-blown nightmare, the balance wheel unexplainably comes to a standstill after just one half-turn. I immediately identified the problem but was of course too polite to point it out