Movement finishing: what you are actually paying for

Movement finishing is where a large share of the price of an expensive watch goes, and it is the part most easily flattered by a photograph. The honest summary: a little finishing makes the watch work better, most makes it look better, and the expensive kind is expensive because it takes a skilled person a long time and cannot be hurried.

That is not a complaint. Decoration you enjoy looking at is a perfectly good reason to spend money. But you should know which techniques carry a real labor cost, which are applied in seconds by a machine, and how to tell them apart through a caseback.

Functional finishing versus aesthetic finishing

A few finishing operations do a job.

• Polished pivots and jewel holes reduce friction and wear directly. A rough pivot destroys oil and then itself.
• Straight-graining or polishing on contact surfaces of levers, springs and the keyless works reduces sticking and gives a predictable feel at the crown.
• Deburring removes swarf that would otherwise break loose and circulate through the movement.
• Plating on brass, usually nickel or rhodium, resists corrosion and handling marks.

Everything else, and it is most of it, is aesthetic. Bevelled bridge edges, striped surfaces, circular grained wheels, blued screws and polished jewel sinks do not make a watch keep better time. They are craft applied to a machine that already works, in a tradition from a period when a fine movement was expected to look finished whether or not anyone would see it. Understanding the movement as an energy chain makes the point plain: none of the decorative operations touch the parts that set the rate.

Anglage: the expensive one

Anglage, or chamfering, is the bevel cut along the edges of bridges, levers and springs and then polished to a mirror. Its origin was functional, since a burr-free edge sheds swarf, but its modern purpose is to catch light and outline the movement's architecture.

Three broad grades exist:

1. Machined bevel, unpolished or lightly brushed. A rotating cutter runs along the edge. Uniform width, slightly dull. Very common at low and mid prices.
2. Machined bevel, then polished by machine or rotating brush. Brighter, still uniform, and the giveaway remains the corners.
3. Hand anglage. Filed, then polished with a wooden peg loaded with diamond paste. Slightly wider than machine work, subtly variable along its length, mirror bright.

The corners decide it. An exterior angle, a point sticking out, can be produced tolerably well by machine. An interior angle, a notch pointing inward, cannot: the rotating tool has a radius and leaves a small rounded corner. A sharp interior angle, polished into the corner, means a person sat there with a file. This is why the number of interior angles on a bridge gets quoted as a boast. See our anglage glossary entry.

Black polishing

Black polishing, also called poli noir, applies to flat steel parts: the click, the ratchet wheel, chronograph levers, tourbillon bridges, cap jewel settings. The part is rubbed in a figure of eight on a flat zinc or tin lap charged with progressively finer diamond paste until the surface is flat enough to reflect light in a single direction.

The result looks jet black from one angle and blinding white from another, which is the test. A merely bright polish looks gray and scattered from every angle. Black polishing is slow, done by hand or on a hand-fed lap, and a reliable sign of a serious finishing budget.

Surface textures, and what they cost

These are the patterns most people notice first, and, frosting aside, almost all are machine-applied.

A useful rule: the more even and repetitive a pattern, the more likely a machine made it. Human hands are less consistent, not more.

Both Cotes de Geneve and perlage are routinely described in marketing copy as though they were craft operations. On a mainstream movement they take seconds per bridge on a jig. That is fine: they are nice to look at and cost the buyer very little. They are simply not evidence of hand work.

Screws, jewels and small details

Screw heads reward inspection because they are easy to compare. On a well-finished movement the head is polished, its rim chamfered, and the slot edges chamfered too so the slot does not look punched. On an ordinary movement the head is plain and the slot edges sharp. Aligned slots suggest a watchmaker who cared, though alignment has no function.

Blued screws come two ways. Heat bluing takes polished steel to around 290 to 300 degrees Celsius, at which the surface oxide reaches a thickness that produces blue by optical interference. The color is in the metal, varies slightly between screws, and has depth. Chemical or galvanic bluing deposits a coating instead: flat, perfectly uniform, often darker or more purple, and able to wear off. Perfect matching across a set of screws, oddly, points to the chemical route.

Jewel countersinks are the chamfers around the jewel holes. At the low end the jewel is pressed into a plain drilled hole. Better movements have a countersink; the best polish it to a mirror, framing the ruby, which is another operation nobody sees on the wrist.

Plate materials: nickel silver, German silver and brass

This is often framed as a choice between nickel silver and German silver, but those are two names for the same alloy: copper with nickel and zinc, containing no silver at all, known in French as maillechort. The real distinction is between plated and unplated.

The overwhelming majority of movements use brass plates and bridges, nickel- or rhodium-plated. The plating gives a bright, uniform, corrosion-resistant surface and can be applied after decoration.

A minority, most visibly the Glashütte makers, use unplated German silver. It is warmer and faintly straw-colored, harder than brass so it cuts crisply, and left bare, which means it oxidizes with handling and develops a patina. It also means working in gloves. That is a genuine cost and a genuine aesthetic choice.

Separately, whether a bridge was stamped from sheet or milled from solid affects the crispness of its edges. Stamped parts have slightly rounded, drafted edges before any bevelling; milled parts start sharp. Under a loupe it shows in how clean the transitions look where a bevel meets a flat.

Reading a caseback by price band

These bands are indicative, and there are honorable exceptions in both directions. The figures are US dollars quoted before sales tax, and list prices in other countries differ with local tax, import duty and distribution, so read them as bands rather than as prices.

• A few hundred dollars. A plain movement, perhaps with stripes on the rotor only. Machined edges, no bevelling, plain screws, jewels in plain holes. Entirely appropriate: the money went into the case, dial and reliability.
• Low four figures. Stripes or perlage on the bridges, a decorated and often engraved rotor, blued-look screws, sometimes a machined bevel. All machine work, all attractive from arm's length.
• Mid to high four figures. Consistent machine bevelling with a real polish, circular graining on the wheels, polished jewel sinks, better screw heads. Look at the corners: you will normally see the small radius of a rotating tool.
• Five figures and up. Where hand anglage with interior angles, black polished steel, hand-finished wheel spokes and finishing on hidden surfaces should begin to appear. If it does not, ask where the money went. It may legitimately be in a complication, a case material or a proprietary escapement, but you are entitled to know.

Named certifications

Two schemes make specific, auditable claims about finishing. Neither is a general marker of quality, and plenty of superb watches carry neither.

The Poinçon de Genève (Geneva Seal) dates from an 1886 Genevan law and has been administered since 2009 by Timelab, a Geneva testing laboratory. Historically it certified the movement, requiring that it be finished and adjusted in the Canton of Geneva and that its components meet defined standards: bevelled and polished steel parts, polished screw heads with chamfered slots and rims, jewels in polished sinks, chamfered and polished wheels, and restrictions on certain cheap components. A revision in 2011 extended certification from the movement to the complete cased watch and added functional testing, including a rate test on the assembled watch, verification of the stated power reserve, and water resistance where claimed.

Qualité Fleurier, established in 2004 by manufacturers based in and around Fleurier in the Val-de-Travers, takes a different route. It requires the watch to be entirely Swiss made and the movement to hold COSC chronometer certification first, adds the Chronofiable durability and aging test, then runs the cased watch through the Fleuritest, a machine simulation of a day's wear, with a rate criterion of zero to plus five seconds a day. Its finishing requirements extend to parts that are never visible.

Both certify a defined process rather than "quality" in the abstract. A watch without either can be finished to a higher standard; a watch with one has at least had someone else check.