Production of liners and supinators

Why do this

Many owners of branded watches cannot afford to change the strap to any other, they need to look for a strap that will fit specifically to their brand and even model. This is due to the design features of watches and straps combined.

The final appearance of the strap and the watch itself appears in electronic form long before its manufacture, modern methods of processing materials allow you to make cases of unique shape and appearance. This gives designers complete freedom, now they can implement almost any idea. And the strap, as you know, is an integral part of this appearance. Also, watch manufacturers are well aware that if they make a strap of a special shape, then a person will be forced to contact an official boutique and purchase an original strap even for fabulous sums, often amounting to 10%, 20% and 30% of the cost of the watch itself. The average life of the strap is 1 year, the warranty on the strap is 30 days, and the service life is only 180 days (6 months). Most of our customers did not even imagine that when purchasing expensive, high-quality watches, they would be forced to use only original straps.

The process of making the supinators is quite complicated. The first difficulty is related to the size of the products themselves, the average size of the supinator is 22x11x2.5 millimeters. The dimensions are comparable to jewelry, and in general the production process is not much different from them.

The second difficulty is the need to observe all the gaps and technological holes.

The third difficulty is related to the need to create a computer model in one of the ways: either reverse engineering, when all dimensions are removed manually by a person, at the same moment the 3D model is also rebuilt, or scanning with special 3D scanners that create a special point cloud, which the engineer will later be transformed into a solid object using the same reverse engineering, but already using measurements from the point cloud.Both the first and the second methods have a number of disadvantages, but the main and common of them are errors. Often every tenth of a millimeter is important, and if it is not caught, then either there will be a backlash, a problematic installation, or the strap simply will not stand on the clock.

To avoid such a situation, the manufacture of the supports necessarily requires the clock itself, otherwise all the work can be wasted. If the watch is in cash, then the sequence of actions is as follows: a 3D model is created, after which a physical plastic sample is created from this model, which is tried on the watch, while taking into account all gaps and errors, on the basis of which edits are made to the existing model. After that, the prototype is made anew, everything is tried on again, and if everything is in order on the second attempt (which happens extremely rarely, usually on the third), then the working sample of the insert / supinator has already been made. It is made either of a special plastic that can withstand heavy loads, or, if the support is experiencing extreme loads, it is made of metal (first wax model, then metal casting). In fact, the manufactured metal insert is a real piece of jewelry, with the only difference that it is made of special hard alloys, and not of precious metals.

As a result, it would seem that an elementary, most often plastic thing, requires very serious efforts for its manufacture.