Masterpiece of Technology Base Factory: Roger Dubuis King DBEX0542(0543)
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23-May-2020
Technology Base Factory
Masterpiece of Technology Base Factory: Roger Dubuis King DBEX0542(0543)
As a master striving to pursue avant-garde, breakthrough and elegance in the field of advanced watchmaking, Roger Dubuis roots its innovation in its sincere respect for watchmaking tradition and workmanship.
In such an era with ever-changing styles, TB Factory has finally made this Roger Dubuis DBEX0542(0543) after two years of research on the overall process from the purchase of original equipment to the development of movement. Then let’s explore the reasons for such a long R&D period for this seemingly simple watch.
First of all, let’s look at the components.
Like most watches, the whole watch consists of watchcase, front and rear covers, glass, letters, hands, movement, lug, watchband, clasp and other parts. Although this watch also has the above components, some accessories are quite difficult to produce.
1. Watchcase
The components of the whole watchcase are clearly shown in the figure. The watchcase consists of a case body, a front cover, glass, a bottom cover and glass. It is made of titanium alloy through the following series of procedures: selection, forging, CNC machine shaping and polishing.
1) The difficulty lies in the forging process (During the thermal processing of titanium alloy, heating temperature is very important. When the temperature is lower, the deformation resistance is greater, and defects such as cracks are easy to occur. Meanwhile, titanium alloy also highly depends on the deformation speed during the thermal processing. During the precision hot forging of titanium alloy, the temperature of the forging die is heated to be equal to or higher than that of the forging piece, so as to restrain the reduction of the forging piece temperature during forging.)
2) The second difficulty lies in the integral polishing. (Due to the material characteristics of titanium alloy, the preparation of metallographic samples of titanium and titanium alloy is more difficult than that of steel. The polishing and polishing efficiency of titanium alloy is low, so excessive and severe cutting and polishing process will produce deformation twins in α phase, and the microstructure analysis of titanium will be disturbed after deformation twins are produced.)
To achieve better polishing, materials must be forged to avoid any obvious sand holes, and to realize better hardness!
3) The highly-transparent sapphire glass is used for this watch, with hardness of Grade 9, and the surface is plated with anti-dazzling blue film.
4) As for the electroplating, the first key point is why the genuine products are not easy to fade. For the electroplating process, the current best one is in-furnace vacuum electroplating. Therefore, in-furnace vacuum electroplating is adopted for DBEX0542.
2. Letters (difficulty)
During the process of making letters, there are also many problems. You may not see any different from the surface. However, after disassembling the watch, you can find that the letters consist of three layers, as shown in the figure. Finally, the scale nail was embedded in the outermost layer.
The common letters are only one single layer: first, select the letter materials; second, carry out special layer processing; third, carry out overall letter printing or 3D printing; finally, embed the scale nails and keep consistent. However, the letter processing of this Roger Dubuis is very special. First of all, the letter structure is multi-layer. Second, its scale nails consist of 30 strips of different shapes in Roman Font as shown in the first figure. Looking at the overall figure, you may find that the scale nails are all made of metal materials. It takes 30 molds to make the scale nails. In addition, the hollow parts of the scale nails are filled with luminous powder. During the process of filling the luminous powder, there are much inconvenience to the master during the filling process due to the different shapes of each scale nail. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that the letter cost of this watch equals to the cost of a middle-end or low-end replica watch, and a scale nail cost equals to the cost of a domestic movement.
3. Pointer
The pointers have two colors: one set of highly polished steel needles; one set of electroplating needles.
The above pointers are different from other types of pointers: the hollow pointers do not have any chamfer on their edges, just the same as the letter nail. This process only needs 3 molds.
4. Movement
1) This watch has particular movements: two-needle movement, nine-point second hand, and pearl tourbillon movement. TB Factory also strived to develop this unique movement, which is different from the large three-needle movement and pearl tourbillon movement on the market. In addition, the biggest problem of this movement is its structural layout and automatic chain feeding efficiency. During the process of developing the whole watch, this movement has been tested countless times and the above problems have been solved. The movement is truly stable, efficient and accurate. As the truly most stable and efficient pearl tourbillon movement in the current market, the movement has meticulous overall polishing!
5. Watchband and other parts
1) The watch is equipped with alligator watchband. Due to the high cost of alligator watchband, many manufacturers do not want to invest too much money here, so many people need to spend part of their budget on buying alligator strap after buying watches. There is the concept of a half-package and a whole-package in the process of alligator watchband, i.e. a process in the connection between the strap surface and the rear part. In terms of the cost, the whole-package is much more expensive than the half-package. However, please be assured that this alligator skin is made of the finest leather material. The process is definitely a complete whole-package process with special grain leather embedded.
2) The adopted lug is customized. The ordinary universal lug may lead to the difficulty in the installment of the watchband and the remove of the watchband, so the solution to this problem is to customize the special lug and make everything simple.
3) The most complained part is the clasp. The clasp is also made of titanium alloy. In fact, from the earliest time, hardware such as the clasp was the most complained part. So why hasn’t this problem been solved? The fundamental reason is the budget problem. The cost of a good clasp is several times more expensive than that of a slightly inferior clasp. In the sales process, the sales price will not be increased due to much more clasp cost. This is the fundamental reason why the clasp has been complained all the time. Ps: The welding of titanium alloy is indeed uneasy.
4) Many wearers may have met the embarrassment of dropping screws or breaking screws.
You’re reading this correctly! All screws are specially customized: we adopted the forged screws just to avoid these embarrassments. We can say that this Roger Dubuis watch is a masterpiece regardless of cost.
Mr.Mark 2020 Masterpiece of Technology Base Factory: Roger Dubuis King DBEX0542(0543)