$2.6 million Patek Phillippe

[mitch]

https://www.wimp.com/building-a-watch-that-costs-2-6-million/

Of note, I was surprised to see some of the dial faces are pad printed (as opposed to engraved or etched) and at the 5:01 mark it shows an engraver using the same Leica microscope I have, but mine doesn't have the eye cup held on with scotch tape. Maybe with the proceeds from selling this watch they'll buy him a new one...

 

[papart1]

wow...........it makes you really think hard on how long this piece took to complete.................pap

 

[davidshe]

Pretty funny Mitch! I also use scotch tape on mine but not to hold the eye cup on but to keep the setting on the lens from moving! I guess I am in pretty good company

 

[Stefan]

For one such watch you can buy a whole engraving workshop. You can buy a good tool and invite 2-3 engravers to work. Body engraving is just not art. But the mechanism itself is perfection.

 

[pilkguns]

It's an excellent video of the process, and a joy to watch (no pun intended). However, it is a real pity that the engraving is so simple a travesty in fact for the price. . The watch just completed by Rick Simmons is much more to my liking and has all the classical elegance befitting a timepiece of this magnitude.

 

[Roger B]

I love the you tube videos by Roger W Smith. Totally hand made watches (not as complicated as these) but the videos do show some fine engraving and guilloche work. Sorry - don't have the links to hand but they are easy to find.

 

[mitch]

now that you mention it, David, maybe the tape is just to keep the adjustable ocular from moving- still looked out of place in that hoity video, tho- lol. (on a curiously related note: i could never get the parfocality feature of my scopes to work unless i use TWO adjustable oculars. with the usual set-up of one fixed/one adj., as soon as i change the zoom/magnification it goes out of focus, but using two adj. eyepieces somehow fixes the problem. we had one heck of a time figuring out & solving that puzzle. nobody at Leica could explain why and they'd never heard of that problem before.)

and yeah, Scott, I thought for that level of project they should have gone with some truly mind-blowing engraving...

 

[sam]

Fascinating video! Gotta hand it to Patek for their ingenuity. But yeah, more complex engraving should would have been nice.

 

[JJ Roberts]

Mich,Great video thanks for sharing. J.J.