Tuesday, September 27, 2011

It's cheaper to buy a real Rolex...

First,let meapologize for the bad english i will use in this letter beacause i'm a french native speaker...
This letter is intended to responde to the guide mentioned in the title, but also to all the other guides that present fake watches as (almost) equivalent their originals (and thus not seeing theneed to by one).
First of all, let me precisethat in order to qualify as "Swiss Made" a watch must have been assembled, adjusted and subjected to official tests in Switzerland. At least 50% of the value of all parts, and its movement must have been made in Switzerland. For the "Manufactures" (Rolex, Zenith, Patek, Jaeger, ...), almost every geponents (if not all for some watch brands, like Parmigiani for example) are manufactured in-house.
You can buy some basic Swiss watch movements (like ETA 2824, for example) for around 50$: these are very reliable and robust movements: mass produced, without any handcrafting but with a very good deviation tolerance of +/- 10-20 sec / day.
If youdecide to go for high-end or "Manufacture"basic movements, these can cost from 500 to 1500$ and maybe more (see 3.), why ?Because:
1.technical solutions are taken in order to ensure best usability (chronograph column wheel), precision (mean and variance) and robustess over time (Omega Co-axial for example), wich means research and development (sometimes for years) and production decisions that are not the cheapest.
2.there are dozens of manual interventions on these: - manual control of the production tolerances at many stages of the production of the geponents.- manual assembly of the movement geponents or parts in order to ensure correct integration, sometimes preceded by a manual desassembly in order to do a geplete cleansing of the movement. - manual adjustment of the movement in order to bring it in deviation toleranceswithin only several seconds / day.
3. craftmanship forthe embelishment of the movement ("ctes de genve", "perlage", engraving, usage of plated or plain gold, ...) =

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