A small watch core composed of more than 100 accessories, placed in the hand, is a thin piece, less than 1/6 the size of the palm. The machining accuracy of these parts is about 5 microns.
Recently, the Hay Think team went to the WHCL Precision Machinery Corporation workshop, where a series of high-precision CNC equipment is continuously producing precision mechanical watch core parts. This global leader in the field of quartz watch cores occupies the first position in the industry in terms of production and sales in the world. Most of the mechanical watch movements it produces are exported to traditional watch producing countries such as Switzerland.
Most of the quartz watch movement materials are plastic parts and metal stamping parts. "WHCL's technical team has overcome technical difficulties in the design and manufacture of high-precision plastic molds and stamping molds, and has made a leap-forward breakthrough in production and quality, and soon opened up the market."
"Through independent innovation of production methods, our mold processing capacity has been doubled several times, and the advantages of high quality and low price have helped us gradually occupy a wider market." WHCL CTO Dr. Liu introduced. Through the innovation of mold technology, the efficiency of WHCL in the key link-transmission wheel mold production has gradually changed from 4 to 8, 16 to 32 from the initial single-machine one-time opening and closing production.
Dr.Mao, the company's mold technical engineer, has worked in WHCL for nearly 20 years, and has participated in the innovation and change of production line efficiency throughout the process. "The most difficult thing is to double from 16 to 32." He introduced that the production design limit of a set of molds is 32, which needs to be extremely uniform during injection molding, so that the quality of 32 parts is consistent.
Today, WHCL produces 400 million quartz watch cores annually, and its products are exported to Europe and Japan, and the sales volume ranks first in the world for quartz watch cores.
Started the development of mechanical watch movements.
"We have achieved the world's first quartz watch core, so we hope to have a new breakthrough made in China in the field of more difficult mechanical watch cores." Dr. Liu said.
The mainstream mechanical watch adopts a fully automatic two-way winding watch movement, which is composed of more than 100 parts, of which the most core main plate has more than 100 processing steps.
The company's process engineer Dr. Cheng introduced that the main plate of the mechanical watch core functions like a computer motherboard. "The accuracy requirements of most processing links are within 5 microns."
In the WHCL workshop, more than 50 sets of high-precision CNC equipment are used to process all aspects of the watch movement in sections. The most attractive is a high-precision combined machining machine with 12 CNC stations and 22 CNC milling cutters.
"This machine is the only one in the world, and it was exclusively customized by us from Schoblin Machine Tool Company in Switzerland. It just entered the production line in June this year." Dr. Cheng introduced. The equipment is called CNC multi-station splint processing machine, which is used for groove milling of main board splint, and can simultaneously complete 12 groove milling processes. "When the watch core rotates, most of the parts will be embedded in the grooves and gemstone holes of the main board to move. Therefore, the accuracy of the groove depth is closely related to the assembly process, which directly affects the overall performance and quality of the watch core."
At present, through more than 50 sets of numerical control equipment, the company's machining accuracy is not only much higher than the traditional manual machining accuracy, but the efficiency has also been greatly optimized.
According to Dr. Cheng, about 60% of the entire watch movement process is completed by numerical control machinery. "Among them, the production of traditional motherboard plywood requires more than 100 processes. With CNC equipment and high-precision finishing molds, only more than 20 processes can be completed."