Spotlight on our Assembly Team

Jan 19, 2024

If you’ve ever looked at any of our watches and thought “wow, this is a masterpiece, these people must be really cool, how the hell did they put this together?!”. 

 

Well… first of all, thanks! And second, we’re going to tell you, right here, right now *cheers and applause*. 

We have three types of watches (two of which are mechanical); quartz, jump hour and Swiss automatic mechanical, and they all need to be assembled in slightly different ways, which is all down to our incredibly talented Assembly Technicians! 

 

Our technicians put their heart and soul into composing every single piece to make sure your watch keeps time perfectly, is fully functional and looks the part, of course. So let’s get into it!

The team assemble quartz watches such as Berry Late Again! and Beam me up! in the following order: the watch movement, the dial, the hour disc, the minute disc and then the case. 

 

Our jump hour watches, such as The Promise of Happiness and Number Cruncher are assembled in a slightly different order: the watch movement, the hour disc, the dial, the minute disc, then the case. 

 

This is because all numbers apart from the one currently telling the time need to be covered to provide the illusion of the hour jumping from one number to the next.

Our Swiss automatic mechanical watches, The Silent Thief and Enjoy the Ride for example, are assembled in the same way as our quartz watches, however, they have a special glass caseback so the exquisite mechanism is visible for you to admire. 

 

Unlike traditional watches, (in fact, far from it) we often don’t use hands to point to the time, we use discs. So for all of our watches it’s extremely important that the discs do not touch, as this can affect the time keeping. 

Our team also ensure that the discs aren’t loose on the rivet, a small, metal component that keeps the discs attached to the movement. 

 

The next part of the quality control process proves that our technicians have the patience of saints… making sure the discs are completely dust-free (nooooooo). Only joking, they love it really! 

 

They do this so that the illusion of transparency through the watch is perfected and that the design is seamless. 

This is why in our behind the scenes videos you may see them wearing super stylish finger gloves, this is so they don’t leave any dust or marks on any of the components.

 

This may be the longest process as sometimes dust may not be spotted until the watch has been fully assembled, so you can imagine the frustration…

 

Next the team cut the factory stem down to the correct length, remove the factory winding crown and replace it with our own MJW crown.

Once a watch is fully assembled, it’s then set to the correct time and left for 12 - 24 hours to make sure it is keeping time correctly before we send it out. 

 

As you can imagine, with the amount of unique watches we have in our collection, no two days are the same for our Assembly Team! 

 

We are so lucky to have such an amazing team who are so dedicated to their craft and sharing it with the world!