THE PARTS OF THE MOVEMENTS. AND THEIR MAKERS.
All quality-relevant parts of a Lange movement are produced in the Lange manufactory in the Saxon town of Glashütte. First, the parts production department manufactures the blanks for plates, bridges, levers, springs, wheels, and pinions. Then, all bores and edges of the parts are deburred by hand and subjected to a high-precision optical measuring process.
This is the starting point of the underlying theme that permeates every facet of manufacturing: machine and measure – the hands that execute the work and the ever-watchful eyes of Lange’s master watchmakers are complementary and inseparable.
PARTS PRODUCTION.
The movement of a Lange watch is a compact high-performance machine composed of several hundred parts. Every individual component must be crafted to the highest level of precision to assure the rate accuracy of the completely assembled watch. To attain this degree of precision, Lange’s masters rely on modern milling and wire-EDM machines that produce blanks with extremely tight tolerances.
During the production processes, they repeatedly check whether the work executed corresponds to their strict specifications. For instance, a plate undergoes up to ten machining passes until all recesses have been milled, all bores drilled, and all threads tapped. If only one tool in a CNC unit is blunt or incorrectly adjusted, all this work would be in vain.
MACHINING AND MEASURING.
Burrs occur wherever metal is milled and drilled. All bores and edges of each component are therefore carefully deburred. Without excep-tion, this is done manually at Lange. After all, no machine is capable of performing this task as expertly as the skilled hands of Lange’s master watchmakers.
Subsequently, the components are measured with great precision. The measuring centre is equipped with sophisticated instruments such as an optical comparator and a video-laser measuring unit. A plate may have more than one hundred bores. They can be verified with an accuracy of up to one tenth of a micrometre.
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