Horological Meandering

Ophiuchus
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Ah, thanks Don! Custom jewels?

I hadn't realized that Speake-Marin or Gauthier were using custom-made jewels for their movements, interesting bit of info.
With Peter, I assume you mean his new Piccadilly, but with Gauthier, which of his models? I'm not as knowledgeable about his.
I do happen to love the work of both, though.

I can't say as I'm surprised that custom jewels are made for the market, but this is the first time someone has confirmed that it
is occasionally done. As far as making your own jewels, I wouldn't expect such a thing. It's perfectly reasonable to source something
that specialized. Although, I'm curious, what could you accomplish with larger jeweling?

When I mentioned I've only heard of one man who makes his own jewels, I was surprised- you see, there are desktop crystal growth
machines for single, high quality pulled monocrystals at sub-10k prices. One would only need a single crystal for enough jewels for
many, many watches. If you know how to cut by hand (I have some background in this), it wouldn't be prohibitively difficult to manufacture
your own jewels, just time consuming. Still, I've entertained the idea myself. Ruby is essentially a simple formula of aluminum oxide, with
chrome added in ratios. Not hard to fabricate if you have a furnace.

I look forward to the rest of your review, and your new projects with order-made jewels. Please do tell us how that works out, and how you
go about ordering them. With the tooling jewel-workers use, I always imagined it extremely expensive to change equipment for custom tooled
jewels. Wouldn't they make you order them in huge batches?

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