If you want to make watches for real you should start by making clocks and work your way down in size as you get more experienced. It will likely take you a lifetime to master the skills unless you can find a watchmaker to train with (and not a movement packager).
If you want to engineer software you should start by making transistors ands putting them together into AND gates and work your way up. It will likely take you a lifetime to master the skills unless you can find a programmer to train with (and not a JavaScript hacker).
Let’s not “no true Scotsman” these folks or anyone for that matter. Everyone starts not knowing everything. Everyone ends not knowing anything.
These people are making cool watches where none existed before. Therefore they are watchmakers. The aesthetic design is an equally important part of the package: who cares if that’s were they decided to focus their first efforts. I imagine a large number of us so-called software professionals started the same way: changing an HTML tags color, hacking a new sprite into a favorite game or changing the color of our DOS prompt.
Bullshit.
> If you want to engineer software you should start by making transistors ands putting them together into AND gates and work your way up.
No, but if you want you can:
> Let’s not “no true Scotsman” these folks or anyone for that matter. Everyone starts not knowing everything. Everyone ends not knowing anything.
Indeed, let's not belittle the people who - you know - actually make watches. This is a very hard to master skill, a sub-branch of clock making and it's just plain insulting to pretend that watch making is the same as watch packaging.
> These people are making cool watches where none existed before.
If you put DIY and 'build their own watches' in a title then the least I expect is someone who knows how to cut a gear to be present on the other side of the link. Otherwise it is just another repackaged movement.
> Therefore they are watchmakers.
Watchmakers would beg to differ.
Source: have worked with and for actual watchmakers in several capacities, once where I wrote the software that controlled specialty machinery to make parts and once where I looked in lots of detail at a company that repaired watches.
> I imagine a large number of us so-called software professionals started the same way: changing an HTML tags color, hacking a new sprite into a favorite game or changing the color of our DOS prompt.
I'd hope they know the difference between software engineering and changing HTML tags color.
I'm sorry, I'm not of the 'participation prize' generation.
If you want to call yourself a watchmaker: show me a watch you've actually made.
Note that many of the major watchbrands are also no longer proper watchmakers, they couldn't make a movement that lasts economically if their lives depended on it. The unit costs are so low that making watch movements economically is hard for even the largest players.
But that doesn't mean you couldn't make your own watch if you wanted to, it would be a labor of love.
Some nice links elsewhere in this thread that are much closer to actual watchmaking than TFA.
There used to be a usenet group a mere 30 years ago for homebuilt computers which had a FAQ explaining they mean home built as in boards full of TTL and using a commercial LSI CPU was considered kinda cheaty. This worked for awhile but eventually crossposting and eternal September utterly destroyed that group as a discussion area or subgenre of the hobby. You can't talk about designing a single bit serial ALU using nothing but 7400 NAND gates, some flip-flops, and wire jumpers if for every on topic post, there are over 100 cries for help from people looking for windows video card drivers for their homebuilt computer, where by homebuilt they mean they purchased a COTS motherboard and a COTS case and screwed the together. And that's how a hobby dies.
Likewise these "watchmakers" are perfectly valid legit jewelers who happen to mount COTS watch movements in their jewelry instead of photographs or gemstones or whatever else other jewelers do for fun. There's nothing wrong with being a jeweler other than misidentifying as watchmaker thereby annihilating all social discussion of actual watchmaking by vertical flooding discussions of watchmaking.
A good analogy of the situation would be I have passed adult and pediatric CPR certifications and several first aid classes but it would be wrong to portray myself as "an emergency room doctor", and get a couple million people to think that way and you'll destroy the medical schools eliminating the possibility of having actual real ER doctors in the marketplace of ideas, nothing but guys who passed a CPR class a couple years back.
An even better analogy is there's about two places on the internet you can get nice plans for wooden clock movements, but they're almost impossible to find because there's an infinite number of websites for wooden clocks on the subject of "build a wooden box, put a COTS movement in it, call it a wooden clock". Its virtually impossible to discuss actual real wooden clocks because of the infinite flood of box-makers who install a movement in their wooden box. There's absolutely nothing wrong with building wooden boxes unless its destroying an online community or commercial marketplace of wooden clock makers.
https://wooden-gear-clocks.com/
http://www.lisaboyer.com/Claytonsite/Claytonsite1.htm
I've been working on a project from the latter site, on and off, mostly off, for some years. Nice plans and nice designs. In comparison google reports 41,700,000 results found for wooden clock, of which the top result, at least for me, is a plastic wood trimmed clock on Amazon using a quartz movement that atomically regulates itself to the radio station WWVB, pretty much the opposite of what I'm looking for. I did not check the other 41,699,999 other sites but they're probably very similar, fake wood box for sale that happens to contain a quartz clock movement or make your own wood box as an exercise in wood box making that can have a COTS quartz movement installed.
A similar analogy is that gray market low quality counterfeit products ruin the marketplace and social discussion of the actual non-counterfeit subject.
Or in summary, the folks in the linked article are doing something cool; it has nothing to do with watchmaking, but it is cool to make jewelry.
If someone gets into understanding more about a thing by doing some DIY then they're getting into the thing. They don't have to go from scratch on every single part.
People don't have to learn to cook a burger starting with planting seeds and raising a steer. Nor do you have to be capable of working on the Epic graphics team to be able to build a good video game. No you just need to use unity and make something fun.
Encourage people to get into the field and let them self select on what interests them, not what interests you.
More people having even basic assembly knowledge the better.
I assume there's a lot of skill in assembling as well.
I'm very curious how they made gears etc. say a 100 years ago too considering they're so tiny.
Gears are typically made with a gearcutter, a precision indexing instrument that revolves a 'blank' through all the gear spur positions to cut the gear halves one-by-one from the blank until the whole gear is done. If you're going to use a high quality hardened steel bit for the cutter and a much more mild material (such as brass) for the gears then you should get a lot of stand time out of a cutting bit.
Another technique you might try is etching, which can be used to make quite high precision parts. And if you want to do some minor automation it is fairly easy to see how a bit of knowledge about stepper drivers and basic machining might help you to create a reasonably accurate and quick automated gear cutter.
An off-the-shelf CNC machine that will cut gears for you is possible but one that is precise enough for watchmaking will set you back a small fortune. Making your own tools and toolbits is a good part of the fun of a project like this.
Also etching sounds an interesting approach too.
But you can also saw the profile manually.
Assembling is hard but doable, the hardest part is the adjustment!
That is something I've wondered; until what scale is that really feasible? Because fancy indexing lathes, gear cutters and CNCs bring in kinda high barrier to entry, but a jewelers saw (presumably?) and a vise are far more approachable for a hobbyist.
I don't know about these days.