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Comment by Antonio123123 | Hacker News Reader

Let me voice my negative opinion: To me it looks worthy of a hobby, but to praise this as something exceptional it's kind of overstretch.

The time required is very long to make the pieces by hand, but I feel any sharp person could do it. Nothing groundbreaking.

So I don't understand people that find this fascinating, inspirational. Just buy a usual watch, and it will have the same pieces.

It's cool that he makes new designs, however make a good market out of that and the chinese will do it too, at better prices.

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If you buy such a watch, you also buy a story. A single person producing a decently complicated watch from scratch is a pretty good story to tell. I image there are enough people in the world with the kind of disposable income required to buy such a watch, so he will have a pretty good business regardless of Chinese copycats.

Well I am not sure. It's a good story to tell if the person is someone important in the community that has for example written important books or invented something that is useful.

If it's just worker-bee man-hours I guess it would be better value-for-money to buy a seiko and tell the story of the factory and how it's made using such complicated processes and optimizations (not sure assumption about seiko factory using complicated processes is right).

not sure assumption about seiko factory using complicated processes is right

Depends on the Seiko. Seiko makes and has made a large number of complicated and historically interesting watches and movements with a story, but your average Seiko won't have that.

If you want a cheap mechanical watch that's a historical 'first' and has an interesting watchmaking story to tell in terms of processes and optimization, get a Swatch Sistem51. It's the first automatic movement that is simple enough and has few enough parts to be mass produced entirely by robot. Of course if that's a 'good' story to tell or not is very much up for debate.

"i could have done that"

"but you didnt"

Why would I manually do the pieces of a clockwork? It's been done manually countless times. Maybe If I would be in metallurgic industry it would make sense to do it as an exercise.

"i could have done that"

"but you didnt"

That guy is a machinist but also a smith, an engineer, an artist,... he is a true artisan that live from his craft.

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