Into the Woods

Nicolette Wong

ome people think that watch dials are just stamped on and that’s it, done! If only it were really that easy!” These words, uttered by a man named Jean-paul Boillat, were part joke, part frustration. Boillat is the director at Les Fils d’arnold Linder, the exclusive producer of Franck Muller’s distinctively eye-catching dials. His domain, a small building nestled in a small Swiss town called Les Bois or “the woods” in the snow-capped Jura mountains, looks nondescript from the outside bar a green sign bearing the name of the company. The simplicity of its surroundings merely serves to emphasise the exquisite nature of the dials the company produces. Everything, including the shaping and cutting of the dials, painting, and diamond setting, is done here. The task of taking us around the dial manufacture fell to Alain Vionnet, the manufacture’s production manager, who assured

gets a rare peek into Franck Muller’s dial manufacture

us that the dials were most definitely not just stamped in 5sec. We knew that we were about to witness a laborious manufacturing process, so it came as quite the shock when, at the very beginning of the tour, Vionnet quite placidly broke a finished mother-of-pearl dial in half. Once the gasps had subsided, he explained that the dial was already doomed before he broke it. Despite its seemingly gleaming appearance, it was actually damaged, scratched in some microscopic way, and therefore unacceptable according to Franck Muller’s stringent standards. The rest of the tour continued with fewer heart-stopping moments, and we were able to see the progression of the dials through each production process. We started with the creation of the brass plate that forms the base of each dial. It starts out life as a smooth disc, about 2cm thick. A two hundred-tonne weight then slams down on the plate, adorning it with a stamped sunray, or frappe soleil, finish. This base is then later cut away from the excess material using water jets that run 24/7. The