Bonjour,
Il est désormais possible d'acheter le magazine américain Watchtime sur Ipad, le pied!
J'en profite pour partager un article fort intéressant sur la manufacture des mouvements Rolex à Bienne. Je n'ai jamais été un fan de Rolex mais mon intéret a changé depuis la lecture de cette article...


Inside Rolex Bienne

From PAGE 104 - 119

The first thing that strikes you is its sheer size. The Rolex movementmaking complex, on the outskirts of Bienne, Switzerland, is a study in gigantism. It consists of four monolithic buildings, occupying 170,000 cubic meters of space. It’s imposing, and, with its air of impregnability, a little mysterious.

We ride out there one February afternoon because Rolex has agreed to give us, two WatchTime editors, a tour of the facility, a mainplate-to-hairspring view of how it makes its movements, 750,000- plus of them per year.

Before the tour, we receive a background briefing, a combination of live presentation and film. It takes place in a proportionately large auditorium attached to what is surely the biggest watchcompany reception area we’ve ever been in: a two-story-high, light-filled atrium with a Rolex-green marble floor.

This complex, Manufacture des Montres Rolex SA, located in an industrial zone called Champs-de-Boujean, is the sister of Rolex SA in Geneva, which makes cases, bracelets and dials; assembles the watches; and does the company’s gem-setting. Rolex corporate headquarters are also in Geneva. (See “Inside Rolex” in WatchTime’s July-August 2006 issue.)

Here in Bienne, about 2,000 employees make movement components, 50 million of them per year, assemble the movements, and send them to Switzerland’s chronometer-testing agency, COSC (Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres) to receive chronometer certification. (All Rolex-made movements receive certification except for most in the Cellini collection — although Cellini Prince models are COSC-certified.) Rolex Bienne then ships the movements to Rolex Geneva for casing. The four Bienne buildings, set against the backdrop of the Jura mountains, are called Rolex III, IV, V and VI. (Rolex I and II are old, former factory buildings near the center of Bienne. Rolex no longer owns them.) The company also has a factory in the town of Le Locle, employing 150 people, where some movement assembly takes place.

Until 2004, Rolex Bienne and Rolex Geneva had different owners. The former belonged to the descendants of Jean Aegler, whose Aegler SA factory in Bienne provided movements to Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf starting in 1905. (For more on the history of Rolex Bienne, see “The Bienne Connection” sidebar). Rolex Geneva was, and still is, owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, which Wilsdorf established in 1945.

Six years ago, Rolex Geneva bought the Bienne facility and the two were merged. That move, along with Rolex’s long-term project of acquiring many of its suppliers of components and equipment, has transformed the company into a vertically integrated manufacture.

CLASS OVER, we set out on the tour. It will have a theme, says François Paschoud, one of the facility’s technical directors: We will be following the manufacturing steps of Rolex’s famous Caliber 4130, the chronograph movement that Rolex launched in 2000 to replace the Zenith El Primero caliber it had been using in its Cosmograph Daytona models. That introduction was a major event for Rolex; it meant that from that point on all movements used in the Rolex brand were made in-house (watches in Rolex’s sister brand, Tudor, have ETA movements). Besides Paschoud, our guides on the tour are the facility’s top manager, Raymond Kerrison, and Jacques Baur, head of research at Rolex.

We start in Rolex V, in the department where the movement’s plates and bridges are made. There, in a huge room filled with the roar of toiling machines, we see something — or rather some things — we’ve never seen before. They look like giant, round, glass pods, or maybe spaceships, nearly as high as the ceiling and 12 feet or so in diameter. The Rolex officials call them “modules.” There are a dozen of them, some connected at the top to an adjacent module by metal rails, which, we soon learn, are a kind of monorail transit system for carrying components from one module to the next. Four of the modules are dedicated to the 4130. Inside each one, a cluster of CNC machines are stamping, drilling, milling, turning and polishing the plates, the rough forms of which were produced, by the stamping process, in another department. We can see almost none of the actual work from outside the modules; the machines have their backs turned to us, as it were, and are facing inside. What we do see is oil, gallons and gallons of it, which is squirted on the plates and bridges to lubricate them during manufacturing and to rinse off metal shavings.

To see the actual processes, such as milling and stamping holes in the plates, we watch a movie on a video monitor. There are more than 50 tools working simultaneously in the four modules. Humans are far scarcer in this room: just one or two are needed to keep the noisy machines humming.

The modules are made exclusively for Rolex by a Rolex-owned company. They serve several purposes. Most obviously, they contain the oil that would otherwise be knee-deep on the factory floor. They also protect the components and machinery from dust. Thirdly, they keep the components at the same precise temperature throughout the manufacturing process so they will neither shrink nor expand. Any such change, however small, would have disastrous consequences given the tolerances involved: two microns, that is, two thousandths of a millimeter, or, as Paschoud says, a few hundredths of the diameter of a human hair.

When one module completes its work, the plate or bridge moves to the next module by means of the monorail. Each component is mounted on its own small pallet. Human hands never touch the component during this phase of production. The entire process consists of about 100 different steps. (Some are performed next door, in Rolex III.) There are some 350 points of measurement for each plate.

Leaving the department, we pass the quality control section where, helped by precision measuring equipment and magnifying lenses, employees in two separate departments check the plates and bridges to be sure they have exactly the right measurements and are free of any surface flaws. They work behind a glass partition in a controlled environment. That, Paschoud tells us, is because a temperature change of as little as 1 degree can affect a component’s measurements.

If the plates and bridges pass muster, they are sent to another department for rhodium galvanic coating and decoration: circular graining, for instance.

WE THEN WALK through an underground passageway connecting Rolex V to Rolex IV, where small components such as staffs, wheels (including balance wheels), and Microstella screws, which are used to adjust the balance, are made. On the way, we pass a man riding a bicycle (another watch-factory first for us). There are more bikes, special Rolex bikes, with light-colored tires, parked at the elevator in Rolex IV. Employees use them to move quickly between the buildings.

This department’s job is to turn bars and tubes of metal, some two meters long, into pieces as small as one millimeter across. Tolerances here are as tiny as two microns. The parts are made by turning, cutting, stamping and spark erosion performed by CNC machines. As in the plates-and-bridges department, much of the work is hidden within the machines. The metal, an alloy of steel, aluminum or copper, goes in one end and, seemingly by magic, comes out the other in the form of infinitesimally small screws (the Microstella screws are made of gold) or tiny wheels. Decoration also takes place here: wheels, for instance, receive a sunray finish.

Our guides show us one machine that is making a pivot for a winding rotor, a component that is still in the testing stage and is hence being produced in a small series. Paschoud pulls out a mechanical drawing of the pivot, which is just 2.5 mm long and 2.2 mm wide, with a diameter of 0.3 mm at its end. It’s a simple thing, but the drawing is so complicated, and dotted with so many measurements, you’d think it depicted a nuclear submarine.

ALL THESE COMPONENTS come together in Rolex VI, our next stop, which we reach through another underground passageway. Before we go in, we don disposable white lab coats and blue plastic shoe coverings so we won’t track dirt inside. The latter are dispensed by a machine (by now we expect no less): we stick our feet, one at a time, smartly into the machine and the booties’ elastic-band tops snap shut around our ankles. But before we get to the movementassembly department, we’re in for a treat, a glimpse at something even inveterate watch-factory tourists seldom see. We’re going to watch hairsprings being made. And not just any hairsprings, but blue Parachrom ones, which are unique to Rolex.

The company introduced Parachrom hairsprings in the 4130 when the movement was first launched a decade ago. Since then, they have worked their way into all Rolex-brand men’s watches (the women’s models, along with the company’s Cellini collection, have hairsprings made of an alloy identical to that used by Nivarox). The advantages of Parachrom, says Jacques Baur, is that it has superior shock-resistance and anti-magnetism. There are two models of Parachrom hairsprings. One is made for the 4130 and 4160 (a relative of the 4130 used in the Yacht-Master II). The other is for the 3100-series non-chronograph men’swatch calibers, used in the GMT-Master II, Submariner, Deepsea, Day-Date, Datejust, Explorer, and Milgauss.

Parachrom is an alloy of 85 percent niobium and 15 percent zirconium. Rolex makes it itself, by taking 30-centimeter rods of each element, two of niobium and one of zirconium, clumping them together and melting them so that they become a homogenous alloy.

The melting takes place inside an electron- beam vacuum furnace, a tall, shiny behemoth that reaches up through the ceiling and looks kind of like a rocketship, albeit a rather chubby one. Like the modules in Building V, it’s a Rolex exclusive. And, like them, it makes us gape because it’s so big and odd-looking. We’re invited to peek into the furnace. The Rolex executives warn us that the light inside it can damage our eyes if they’re unprotected, and hand us dark goggles. We climb up on a viewing platform, put on the goggles, and peer into the furnace through a porthole. There we see the soon-to-be Parachrom rod being heated by a burning stream of electrons to a temperature of 2,400 degrees Centigrade. The rod glows with fiery intensity. It is heated one section at a time: the rod will pass through the electron fire three times before the metal is completely blended. The process is entirely automatic, but a technician observes it on a video monitor to make sure nothing goes awry.

Parachrom blended, it’s time to turn it into hairsprings. That requires a marathon series of stretching and flattening operations, punctuated by occasional heat treatments to soften the metal so that it can be worked. When they’re over, the original 30-centimeter-long rod, which is one centimeter in diameter, will be three kilometers long and about 0.1 millimeter thick (the exact thickness will vary according to the type of hairspring being made). A single rod yields 10,000 hairsprings.

The first stretching process is cold rolling. It’s performed by two men in lab coats who stand on either side of the rolling machine, passing the ever-thinner rod back and forth through ever-smaller notches in the machine. They seem like an anachronism in this world of advanced technology. The reason flesh-and-blood workers perform this task, Baur explains, is that the metal is quite brittle when it first comes out of the furnace and must be handled very carefully until it develops some elasticity. When the men are finished, the bar is three meters long.

Machines take over again for the next process: wire drawing. We stop to watch one machine pulling the wire through four successive dies as it becomes ever thinner. It will pass through about 50 dies in all. Then the wire, which is still round, like a pencil, is flattened by a technique called high-precision cold rolling. It takes place in its own, temperature-controlled room. We can’t go inside, Baur tells us: the change in room temperature caused by our presence would ruin the wire. The thickness tolerances the machines must meet are 0.1 microns. We peer through the glass at the machine and can barely see the wire: at the end of the process, it is 50 microns thick and 150 microns wide.

Now the straight wire is turned into a coiled spring, manually, through a delicate and painstaking process called, in French, estrapadage. A woman takes three 20-centimeter segments of wire and, with a dexterity that amazes us, threads one end of each segment through a thinner-than-a-hair notch in the middle of a lifesaver-shaped mold, affixing the strands at the center so they will stay in place. She then rotates the mold, as if it were a potter’s wheel, causing the three wires to wrap around the spindle within the mold. The reason three wires are coiled in one mold, Baur explains, is to provide the correct spacing and hence the correct curvature for each coil. The mold is heated so the wire will retain its new shape. Then, using a tweezers, the technician separates the three springs, which are about 6 millimeters in diameter. Difficult as the coiling process is, Baur tells us, separating the springs is much harder: one tiny slip of the tweezers and the springs are rendered useless.

What about the springs’ blue color, we ask. They’re a nice shade of cobalt or royal blue, very close to the color of blued steel screws or watch hands.

The color is produced by an oxidation process, we’re told. It not only spruces up the springs’ appearance, it makes them more stable — that is, better able to perform consistently over a long period of time. We are not allowed to see the bluing operation: it’s a Rolex secret.

We do get a look at one of the last hairspring-making steps: the bending of the outer end of the spring into a Breguet overcoil. It is done automatically by a machine, another Rolex exclusive, which is fitted with two flat hammers that strike the spring at precise points to bend it at the correct angles. But because the Parachrom has tiny inconsistencies from spring to spring, and thus responds slightly differently to the hammer strikes, an employee looks through a microscope to check the precise curvature of each spring. If needed, she makes adjustments using the hammer machine.

NOW IT’S TIME to see all the parts unite to form Caliber 4130. We go to the movement assembly department. There, workers specialize in specific assembly tasks. One person puts the gear train together. Another mounts the balance and, using an electric screwdriver programmed to provide just the right amount of torque, screws down the balance bridge. We see the 4130 come to life: its blue hairspring starts to expand and shrink as if it’s breathing.

To protect the movements from dust while they’re being assembled, they’re placed on a horizontal, rotating carrousel underneath the watchmaker’s bench. Each movement — there are 10 on each carrousel — pops up through a hole in the bench when its turn comes to be worked on. It then drops down again and the next movement presents itself. The technicians’ hands move as deftly as if they were those of robots performing microsurgery.

Then a machine lubricates the movements. We watch a video screen as the machine places tiny droplets of oil on each tooth of an escape wheel. All told, there are 200 different points in the movement that need lubrication. The company uses five types of lubricant in each caliber. There’s one lubricant for the winding barrel, for instance, another for the chronograph mechanism. Some of the oils are manufactured in-house; others by outside suppliers using recipes exclusive to Rolex. Important as lubricants are (Baur says the stress endured by some components is equal, relative to size, to the stress a train imposes on a train track), they’re applied in almost trace amounts. Each year, the company uses just 10 liters of oil for all the movements it makes and services.

The next stop on the tour is the fine adjustment department. There, an employee corrects the movement’s rate so that it will meet COSC standards. Using a tiny wrench, she turns the gold screws; Rolex has named them Microstella screws because of their star-like shapes. There are four of them, in two sizes, all four affixed to the inner edge of the balance wheel.

When she finishes, the movement is running as precisely as anyone could want. But it’s missing something: it’s not yet a chronograph. That’s soon remedied: a watchmaker assembles the chronograph components onto the base movement. She uses a needle-thin applicator to place lubricant in eight different places in the chronograph mechanism. She screws the bridge into place. Then she checks her work, starting and stopping the chronograph to make sure the column wheel, clutch, hammers, cams and all else work correctly. Bingo.

The movement will now be sent to COSC, either to the agency’s Bienne office or to its Geneva facility. In 2008, COSC certified 769,850 Rolex movements. (COSC data for 2009 will be released in August.)

Just one stop remains. Standing in the top-floor restaurant in Rolex VI, we look out through the picture window at an enormous construction project. That, we’re told, is Rolex VII. When it’s finished, in 2012, it will provide an additional 230,000 cubic meters of space. It will house, among other things, a robotized components storage and delivery system that will transport parts to distant work stations in a matter of minutes. The new extension will be connected to Rolex IV and VI, creating one mega production unit. Soon giant Rolex will be bigger still.!

Soon giant Rolex will be bigger still.

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Jeff.

impressionnant ce "gros machin", comme quoi y'a pas de hazard dans l'industrie...

a+ et merci

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» Soon giant Rolex will be bigger still.




Salut Jeff,

merci d'avoir déniché ce reportage caméra sur l'épaule !

La dernière phrase vient à mon avis un peu gâcher l'ensemble...

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Je déteste deux choses: l'analyse et le pouvoir. Sviatoslav Richter

Super article... merci Jeff
Rolex c'est vraiment un monde à part, on parle souvent des légendes (dayto, sub) mais il ne faut pas oublier que leur force c'est aussi cette industrialisation complète et maîtrisée des processus de fabrication; peut être le coeur de leur buisness model aujourd'hui avec Rolex VI.

vinz