Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2 Watch Review
The Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2 is a rare creation, handcrafted in La Chaux-de-Fonds using traditional methods and an inordinate amount of time, proving the very antithesis of mass production. Mark McArthur-Christie explores a world where excellence is the norm and a lottery win is essential.
Greubel Forsey watch
Casio makes around 40 million watches a year, that’s around 1.3 watches popping off the line every second. In the same period, Greubel Forsey will make perhaps three Handmade 2s. Each one will take more than 5,000 hours to complete – 714 working days, near enough.
On those numbers alone, the Greubel Forsey atelier is the sort of obsessive setup that makes proper watch people smile and gives spreadsheet-fondlers kittens.
Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2 – no CNC in sight
‘Hand made’ here is not idle marketing. Frequently the term incorporates products that have been ‘CNC machined then hand assembled’ rather than produced by a person with a set of tools, an unnatural amount of patience and a bench. In the case of the Hand Made 2 though, the only things that don’t fall into that category are the sapphire crystals, case gaskets, spring bars, mainspring and most jewels; put simply, that’s around 4% of a Hand Made’s 270 components.
Making by hand is a serious challenge. Human beings are not precise. They err a little here, vary a little there. This means the irregularities that make handmade watches beautiful and full of soul also make them, in effect, functioning prototypes. Not so here. Greubel Forsey says that the Hand Made 2 is ‘…created to the same quality standards as any other Greubel Forsey timepiece’. So the sort of quality that would make a Rolls-Royce inspector sweat, then.
Practically, this means a human being using lathes, milling machines and jig borers, working in tiny increments and by hand; no CNC kit in sight. To produce components to the sort of precision needed here, that needs detailed machining plans, constantly reconditioned cutting tools and modern measuring kit to QC the results. The team allows for the effect of temperature on machinery down to the tolerance of minute individual components.
Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2 – balance springs
This ‘in-house’ philosophy extends even to balance springs. Unable to find an external supplier who could meet its specifications, Greubel Forsey began trialling its own springs in 2012 with makeshift setups and recovered wire. By 2014, encouraged by the results, it developed its own proprietary material and in 2015 it had its own raw wire with exactly the properties it was looking for.
But the base material is only half the story of a balance spring. To start manufacture, the firm sourced, bought and then restored what it politely describes as ‘old artisanal machinery’. This means the wire can be progressively drawn down to the thickness of a human hair, laminated and then flattened (it begins life with a round, not a flat, profile) to exactly the required tolerance.
After all this, remarkable and labour-intensive as it is, you still remain with a flat wire, termed a ‘blade’. Thereafter, the blade has to be coiled into the familiar spiral shape and ‘set’ it in a vacuum furnace before being stabilised in a cyclic aging oven. There are types of surgery that are less complex.
Of course, having spent all that thought, time and effort on producing a balance spring, you’re not just going to nip down to Cousins and buy a balance off the shelf. Unsurprisingly, Greubel Forsey design and make its own. This all happens in a dedicated Balance-Spring workshop where the watchmaker also coils, cuts and manually shapes each spring’s terminal curve.
Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2 – front of house
Then there’s the rest of the movement. The going train and barrel bridges are made of hand-frosted German silver, inset with gold chatons, so they should patinate beautifully. They contrast with the heat-blued hands and the polished barrel cock and balance bridge. The power reserve, minute track and small seconds dials feature Grand Feu enamel. Indeed, wherever you look, the finishing just makes you smile. As well as the frosting, there’s black-polishing, straight-graining, polishing and chamfering almost everywhere else. Even the inner edges and slim arms of the gear wheels are chamfered.
Then there’s the power reserve mechanism. Zoom in on the photos and you’ll see a conical jewel that acts on a tiny, circular jewel wheel mounted on a lever. The lever connects, via a jewelled bearing and a tiny gear, to the power reserve indicator. As the mainspring’s power runs down, the small jewel and its lever act as a ‘feeler arm’ and translate the cone’s vertical movement to horizontal motion, allowing the indicator needle to move along the scale. And look again at the finishing here – the lever is grained, the cock holding the lever is black polished, the jewel is mounted in a gold chaton and the indicator needle is heat-blued. If there’s a more mechanically pleasing and aesthetically elegant – or better looking – power reserve out there, please let me know.
Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2 – case
The 18-carat white gold 41 mm case is, as you’ll expect by now, cut, milled and shaped by hand. I can forgive Greubel Forsey for buying in the sapphire caseback and crystal, but I suspect it will only be a matter of time before it grows its own boules of aluminium oxide in a Bond-style lair somewhere in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Focus the macro lens once more and take a look at the case sides; far deeper than usual, striated horizontal brushing but mirror polished lug faces, all perfectly executed.
Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2 – closing remarks
Perhaps one of the most striking achievements of the Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2 is that, despite the months of work, love and craft that has gone into it, the watch remains elegantly unshowy. Actually, that’s not quite right – it’s exactly because of the care and obsession that’s gone into it that it doesn’t need to shout or act in an unseemly flamboyant manner.
You get a watch that has the soul that only a human can bring but with the sort of quality you usually only get from a computer. Stephen Forsey and Robert Greubel’s backgrounds in vintage watch restoration and prototyping are clear to see. Their experience is manifest in the mechanics, aesthetics and finishing, culminating in the sort of watch an 18th-century master would make today.
Am I impressed? Put it this way, the ESCAPEMENT team have clubbed together to clear the local shops of lottery tickets and I have the Greubel Forsey atelier on speed dial.
Further reading
Technical specifications
- Model: Greubel Forsey Hand Made 2
- Case: 18-carat white gold, diameter 40.9 mm, thickness 12.80 mm, water resistance 3 ATM (30 m), sapphire crystal to the front
- Functions: hours, minutes, small seconds, power-reserve
- Movement: hand-wound movement, frequency 21,600 vph (3 Hz), chronometric power reserve 72 hours.
- Price on application