The atelier is on the second floor of a stone building in Le Sentier, in the Vallee de Joux, two hours north of Geneva. The window looks at a pasture. There are six benches.
Hubert Veuvey is fifty-seven. He has been a watchmaker for thirty-six years. The last twenty-two have been spent servicing perpetual calendar and minute-repeater movements for Patek Philippe.
He is not employed directly by Patek. He runs a small independent workshop authorized by the manufacture to service certain references under warranty.
He arrives at the bench at 07:30 with a thermos of coffee his wife Solange has filled. The thermos is older than two of the apprentices.
His bench is mahogany. Above it a green-shaded lamp, a binocular microscope on a swing arm, and a small rotating brass dust cover that he can drop over the work in one motion if anyone opens the door.
Today on the dust cover is a 5270 perpetual calendar chronograph. The owner is a collector in Singapore. The watch is in for its first full service, ten years after purchase.
"Ten years is correct," Hubert says. "Ten years is what we ask. Most owners wait fifteen. Then we open it and we find dry oil and worn pivots."
“Then we open it and we find dry oil and worn pivots.”
He charges, through the workshop, around 4,200 Swiss francs for a full service of a 5270. The work takes him between forty and sixty hours spread over six weeks.
His own salary, as a senior watchmaker with his level of accreditation, is roughly 9,800 francs a month plus a thirteenth-month bonus. He owns a small house in Le Brassus.
"It is a good living for the valley," he says. "It is not Geneva. It is not what a banker makes. But there is no bank in Le Sentier and we like it that way."
He disassembles the movement over three days. Each part goes into a labeled compartment in a wooden tray. The chronograph bridge alone has seventeen components.
He cleans the parts in a Greiner ACS 900 ultrasonic machine, in three baths: a degreaser, a rinse, and a drying spirit. Then by hand, with peg wood sharpened on a strop, for the pivots and the wheel teeth.
He oils with Moebius 9010 on the slow-moving pivots, 9415 on the escape wheel teeth, and a special grease, HP-1300, on the keyless works. He uses an oiler the diameter of a fine cat hair.
"One drop too much and the oil migrates," he says. "It crawls. It is alive, oil. It does not stay where you put it unless you respect it."
He has trained four apprentices. Two are still in the valley. One is in Tokyo at a service center. One left watchmaking and became a baker.
"The baker is happy," he says. "I visit him. He gives me bread."
He works until 12:15. Lunch at home with Solange. Back at the bench at 13:30. He leaves at 18:00 most days. He does not work weekends. The hands and eyes need rest, he says, or the work is no good on Monday.
He will retire in eight years. The bench will go to a young woman from Lausanne who started with him last September. He has already chosen her tools.
"I do not make watches," he says. "I keep them alive. That is different. That is enough."
