Located in the northern shore of Lake Neuchâtel and flanked by the Jura Mountains, Neuchâtel is the home to many watch manufactures including Panerai, Zenith and HYT watches. Just 15 minutes away by train from the city of Biel/Bienne, Neuchâtel is also home to spectacular vineyards, Switzerland’s largest bird watching paradise and decadent fish cuisine straight from its glacier water lake. Housed inside the Preciflex headquarters, the HYT Manufacture feels more like some sort of secret technology lab rather than your typical watch manufacture. Preciflex develops, industrializes and manufactures disruptive micro- and meso-fluidic devices with the purpose of indicating, injecting, diffusing or managing power. They target industries such as watchmaking, medical devices, interior design objects, cosmetics and automotive. Their expertise offers new solutions in the areas of micro mechanics, fluid mechanics, chemistry, electronics and optics.
The HYT Manufacture holds all the secrets to what is today the most innovative and unique way of telling time. Since the invention of the tourbillon by Abraham-Louis Breguet, no other innovation in the field of horology has been as ground-breaking as when HYT released their first watch in 2012. Powered by a manual wound movement, a module with two bellows —made of a special alloy used in aerospace— releases with the utmost precision the right amount of energy for two contrasting immiscible liquids to flow inside a capillary tube that has been bent by the hands of a female watchmaker. This person is the only one in the whole manufacture allowed to conduct this task.
To bend the crystal capillary —about one millimeter thick— into its round or skull shape, the watchmaker accomplishes the task only by using a torch and a special machine that assists in the bending operation. Almost like looking at blown glass being bent at a workshop in Murano.
But the capillary bending operation doesn’t stop there, afterwards, with the use of a microscope, the capillary has to be inspected to ensure that its interior maintains the same thickness throughout to guarantee the proper flow of the immiscible liquids. An operation that is conducted for every single watch made by the brand and that does not allow for any margin of error.
As far as the fluids inside the capillary, these have been carefully developed by a chemist from Preciflex in order to make sure that they have the right density, color, tolerance to changes in temperature, viscosity and shelf life without compromising time indication or corrosion to the bellows. With the use of an oversized curved lever that connects the movement’s collaborating elements, a complex chain reaction, whereby the calibre pushes against a regulating bellow with walls four times thinner than a human hair, the immiscible liquids start their twelve-hour journey in a back and forth symphony.
Once the fluidic module has been put together with its corresponding capillary, the fluids need to be injected in a pressurized chamber that guarantees that no air or particles of any kind make it inside the capillary. Every module is individually numbered and hand adjusted to guarantee that the fluids flow at the speed of time, every second and every minute to accurately indicate the hours.
After all high-tech lab operations are completed and the module has been properly regulated, it is time for the watchmakers to assemble the watches by hand and make sure that time is indicated accurately by the fluids one more time after casing is completed. In reality, the work behind one of the most clever horological ideas ever is not simple or conventional at all. HYT along with Preciflex operate with a ton of secrecy but also in a manner where watchmaking is as much science and chemistry as it is physics. Careful very talented individuals conform a small operation that makes around 500 watches a year in Neuchâtel.
And what would it be of a watch manufacture visit without a proper meal to feed our #watchlife. After the impressive visit to HYT and Preciflex we were treated to one of the best meals we’ve had in Switzerland at a restaurant that specializes in buttered perch from lake Neuchâtel. Another incredible day in our #watchlife and many thanks to our friends at HYT and Preciflex for allowing WCL in their compound.
For more info on HYT click here.
