Second Xmas today. Received first shipment of tools for the new 5-axis cnc. Here you can see how your payments gets reinvested. 🙂

roadwarrior

Grand Tyme Master
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Clemens Helberg

ART1: Preparation of Damascus steel dial
I will show you within the next few days how the damascus steel blocks are getting turned into some cool sandwich dials. Lots´of handworks and expensive tools and procedures are required to transform pure steel into a one of a kind dial.

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1)The damascus steel block from my knifemaker was turned down to the required dial diameter. Out of this long damascus steel block the single 0.40mm thick dials are cutted.

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2) Picture two shows the 0.40mm thick dial cutted out of this block. Looks very unspectacular right now.
🙂


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3)
  1. The third picture shows the dials after just a few minutes of etching to confirm the dials are having the right pattern and structure. On the left side there you see the damascus pattern called "explosion damascus" and on the right the "chess damascus". The explosion damascus steel dials will from now being processed.
TO BE CONTINUED!
🙂
 
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Part 2: Sanding of the damascus steel dials
Yesterday I was sanding down the damascus steel dials with sanding paper. Starting with 400 grain sanding paper, over 800 grain sanding paper and finishing the dry sanding with 1500 grain. When the dial was sanded with 1500 grain the surface is looking slightly polished already and you could see the pattern of the damascus steel already starting shining through even without chemical etching. Today the dials will be wet polished with higher grains of up to 15000 grain. So this is a highly manual task that´s been done with human muscels.
🙂


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Part 3: Polishing the damascus steel dials

After sanding the damascus steel dials I proceeded today with polishing the dials. It took several of hours of wet-sanding with up to 15000 grain. The final polishing was made on the polishing machine and is also bringing up already the pattern of the damascus steel. Very difficult to photograph as you only see the reflections.
🙂


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PART 4: DEEP ETCHING and POLISHING (again)
After the dial was mirror polished it was time to deep etch the damascus steel dial. When it comes out of the chrmicals it doesn´t look that appealing!
🙂


After deep etching the dial will be high polished again.
For the next 12 hours the polished dial will now be etched again to get even darker black etched color and polished again.

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PART 5: LASER ENGRAVING
The laser engraving/cutting is made on one of my new laser systems. The engraving process Is now effective and with unlimited possibilities for the design, but never forget this Made in Germany YAG laser machine costs around 80.000 Euro.

80,000 Euro equals
$97,204.00 United States Dollar
Jan 13, 8:51 PM UTC · Disclaimer

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I'm enjoying this series of posts that show how the damascus dials are made. One of these dials are for my US Flag K2 6k meters DLC being made.
 
I'm enjoying this series of posts that show how the damascus dials are made. One of these dials are for my US Flag K2 6k meters DLC being made.
The more I see the work, I appreciate the technology and looking forward to seeing future creative dials from Clemens. Congrats to all who scored one of the 2020 offerings.
 
PART 6: Finalizing the damascus steel dials
Each one of the 50 stars in the dial has a width of just 0.70mm or 0.026 inch.

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Pickup of 5-axis Cnc milling center
Today in Munich our truck picked up our new 5-axis cnc milling center. This was it worth driving 1500km in two days with snow and rain all day long.

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5-axis MILING CENTER ARRIVED

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What a lot of work to get the machine save from Munich into our tool area. Even it was arranged everything upfront one service provider, who was responsible to pick up the machine from the truck, gave up when he realized the weight of 7500kg and the high value of the machine. Great, the truck was waiting at 07:00AM to get unloaded and nearly no option was left to get the machine down and moved into the tool area.

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Fortunately one out of 20 companies we called could manage this weight and, even more important, could come in relatively short time. You have to pay high penalties when the truck doesn't get unloaded after arrival. Then we had to move the machine on catapillar rolls to its location. Mounting the machine feets under the machine was another headache!

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So this whole project started on Sunday and finished this minute on Thursday.

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TIMASCUS HEAT COLORING

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For the first time I have successfully produced my own Timascus and the first sheet of this test production was heat colored! Wow, with some more experience this will look not too bad. Heat coloring by flame is giving more individual look and I have already system in mind to produce repeatable result too.

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DIAL with UK FLAG
I saw a request for a dial with UK and I´m not really specialist when it comes to flags.
🙂
I think this could be possible and could be made with my own machines same as the dial with the US flag. A small batch could be produced on interest as bead blasted / DLC coated / sandwich dial.
🙂

I hope I have chosen the right flag layout.
🙂
The areas in red will be glowing in the night.

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DIAL WITH UK FLAG
From yesterday's drawing materialized to new product today
👍
😀

Of course it could also have been your company logo!

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