The Spirit of Atelier : promoting an alive academy of home made manufacturing techniques while realizing timepieces in limited numbers every year, as to immortalize such knowhow and secure a totally free creativity, with no limit and no constraint.
The Spirit of Atelier is also the progress which from conception leads to achievement, from the idea to the object.
Watch-making belongs to this category of craftsmen (cabinet makers, stringed-instrument makers, goldsmiths and jewelers) using traditional tools, which gives to their creation an authentic value, the one of a piece of art. Without this technical knowhow human beings cannot concretize their dreams with own hands.
The ambition of the Atelier is to have craftsmen working together, the ones mastering perfectly manual home made manufacturing techniques, allowing them to handcraft any mechanical timepiece's component by using traditional tools. These tools are nowadays much more accurate than ever before. Such ancestral knowhow is only transmitted from generation to generation, sometimes leaving gaps or breaks which need to be filled out or reinvented.
As to be totally free to imagine and create without any compromise any object the watchmaker must completely master both of his own hands as well as the use if his tools.
Before performing a major piece of music with all necessary sensitivity a virtuoso musician must possess all of the instrumental technique and his own virtuosity, the one which makes him free to concentrate on the emotions to transmit.
So it goes with a craftsman watchmaker who has to master all of main techniques, making him capable of manufacturing the components he did imagine, whatever its shape or dimension is. These techniques are :
• Tracing
• Hacksaw blanking, using very thin blades
• Filing
• Chisel turning
• Mechanical turning
• Gear-wheels and pinion cutting
• Pivoting
• Drilling
• Up righting
• Smoothing
• Heat-treating
• Chamfering
• Polishing
• Galvanization
It takes many hours at the bench, accumulating hundreds of different parts, to reach the level of easiness and delight which one finally gets when sculpting material and seeing step by step coming into shape the component originally imagined, precise and beautiful.
Throughout centuries hundreds of watchmakers have been repeating the very same movements, using about the same tools, creating masterpieces one can today admire in museums and private collections.
At low costs an experienced master watchmaker can restore any timepiece, whatever its origin or who has been its creator. Today such highly qualified craftsmen are missing. For instance certain famous watch brands are having problems when having nowadays to repair in-house a detent escapement pocket watch from the 19th century, which detent would have been lost ! Because, when no technical drawing exists, a modern manufacturing company's machinery is not enough to recreate a component handcrafted 150 years ago !
A craftsman working in the Atelier is capable of handcrafting a unique component or object directly from raw material. He masters its mathematical calculation and mechanical capacities, he designs its contour or shape. The assistance of computer for 2D and 3D technical drawings allow him to handcraft identical components with most precision.
The craftsman is the master of his own creation, without the help of any external assistance who might corrupt his original creative approach.
This very enriching knowledge makes of craftsmen working in the Atelier tomorrow's independent creators.
