How the wall clocks are manufactured

I have teamed up with to skilled woodworkers from Latvia who have know each other since early school days.

They have a little company with two more employees, and they make the dials from scratch in their small facility. They use local oak wood from especially Latvia and Lithuania.

This also means that they quality check all dials themselves.

Craftmanship

The process of manufacturing the PureTime dials consists of both work by hand and work my machine.

Around 50% of the time is spent using a CNC cutter that cuts out the required patterns and styles in the solid wood. The other haft of the time is pure craftmanship used on sanding, waxing, inspecting and polishing. This it the part where all the details are finalized.

CNC cutting vs laser cutting

Cutting through CNC is the far most used technology when working with solid wood. Other wooden dials are typically made with laser cutting.

• Laser cutting is the best technology when working with extremely detailed and fine patterns. The thin laser beam allows the cutting to be done very accurately.
   
• However, a laser cutter can't cut very deep into the wood, and as it burns away the wood, you'll always a have a tiny miscoloring of the pattern edges cut out.
   
• A CNC cutter can't work as detailed as a laser as it uses a drill in the cutting process. However, CNC can work deep in materials and make nicely curved cut-outs and engraving - with no miscoloring.

The process of manufacturing the dials

There are a lot of smaller steps in order to make the perfect dial, but I'll try to describe it in a shorter bullet point way.

1. Cutting the dial to design specifications

First thing to do is to cut out the dials to meet the requited design of the dial (cut-outs, engravings and smaller details).

After this step no more cutting is done as all cutting and engraving has to be done before the clock dial is waxed, painted and polished.

2. Cleaning after cutting out

The dial is cleaned/brushed to remove left-overs, chips and sawdust - making ready for the next step.

3. First round of waxing - with color

If some parts of the dial needs another color than the regular oak wood, this is where it's done. It is typically the cut-outs, engravings or the dial itself that needs another color variant.

After 10 minutes the remaining wax is removed and the rest is left to dry.

4. Another round of sanding

It's time to sandpolish again - this time to remove the dried wax left-overs. It's also at this stage the clock receives a finer grade of polishing.

5. Last waxing and polishing

Now the dials are treated with a transparent wax to finish the dial off and to protect it against change in humidity and other surroundings.

Finally the dial is handpolished to secure a perfect finish.

When the dials are done, they are packed carefully and shipped to me.

Making your order ready

When I receive your order, I mount the movement, a rubber sealing, a locking nut (to secure the movement onto the dial), the desired hands and a hands nut to keep the minute hands in place.

The watch is carefully packed in a box with accessories included - and the watch is on it's way!