Konstantin Chaykin Interview & Manufacture Visit In Moscow, Russia

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Konstantin Chaykin Interview & Manufacture Visit In Moscow, Russia

SEP 30, 2018 — BY DAVID BREDAN

https://www.ablogtowatch.com/konstantin-chaykin-interview-manufacture-visit/

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Following a nerve-racking 80-minute taxi drive through Moscow – the trill of a lifetime, I can tell you that! – I arrived at the Konstantin Chaykin manufacture. Because what’s a better combination for a festival of fiery plastic death than cheap petrol, poorly maintained cars, lots of traffic, and the deep-rooted spirit of racing for the same patch of tarmac evidently shared by thousands of Eastern-block taxi drivers?! Set in the bowels of a decidedly Russian industrial estate, the Konstantin Chaykin manufacture building itself is actually neat, with little flowers and Konstantin’s red Ducati bike surrounding it. After passing a few watchmakers who were enjoying a quick break, getting a breath of fresh air (and nicotine), before the Napoleon- and Hitler-defeating Russian winter would rear its unfriendly head again, I entered through multiple security doors, climbed a flight of stairs and finally arrived at a matrix of offices at the end of a hallway. The first room I entered was that of Konstantin’s super kind secretary, whose office walls are decorated by some 73 framed documents hanging on them – these are the pending patents awarded for Konstantin’s inventions. In fact, there are so many of them that the walls have actually filled up and now the frames continue down the aforementioned hallway. Click on the middle of the frame below to start a quick video view of this room.

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In 2004, Breguet held an exhibition at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg – the city where Konstantin was born. He, then 29 years of age, had been already selling watches and performing basic repairs in a small store that he had owned and was deeply impressed and fascinated by what Breguet could achieve some 200 years ago, without any of the highly precise, modern manufacturing tools that are widely relied upon by watchmakers of today. And so, Konstantin set out to finish his first clock that he started working on in 2003 and finished in 2004, with his rather basic tool set, based on blueprints and guides he could find: a tourbillon… The first tourbillon made in Russia since 1917. It’s fun to realize that some of the very best independents of our time all started out with something outrageously complicated: Hajime Asaoka with his Tourbillon #1, Aaron Becsei with his record-breaking miniature double zappler (quickly followed by a tourbillon travel clock), and Konstantin with his first tourbillon clock. That’s a fun similarity between three of my personal favorite independents that I just recognized.

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Fast forward to 2018 and Konstantin today directs a two-story manufacture with a staff over a dozen-strong, including engineers, watchmakers, lathe and CNC and laser machine operators, dial painters, case and buckle decorators, and polishers… and is managing a waiting list that stretches out to late 2019, early 2020. He knows what exactly everyone in his manufacture is doing and why and specifically how they are performing their tasks. Over the course of the two days, the only time when he couldn’t respond immediately to a – in hindsight rather over complicated – question of mine was simple because of a slight language barrier. As we passed through the different rooms and their familiar arrangement of smaller and larger machines – massive, forklift-sized CNCs for machining plates through tiny lathes for polishing the two narrow bevels on the Joker’s bezel all the way to a high-pressure, clean room for spray painting the eyes and moon phase tongue discs of the Joker watch.


To this day, Konstantin spends a lot of his time at the watchmaker’s bench too… And it’s not only in favor of those immensely complicated, special pieces I mentioned before, but for fragile parts of other watches too – like the dial assembly of the Joker and Clown watches, which not only take a lot of time and hence are very expensive to produce, but are also very intricate and challenging to assemble, leaving absolutely no room for error. Just to give you an example, one out of 10 pieces made in-house for the eyes – those small, convex, spray painted discs – of these watches can be used, for the extremely tight tolerances when it comes to how the paint settles on these intricately shaped, forever visible parts. No wonder, then, that these couldn’t be outsourced to any supplier, who much prefer bulk orders of run-of-the-mill stuff, rather than such intricate, high failure rate pieces that require additional development and investment in special tooling and training. Wheels, crowns, dials, even hands are made in-house – jewels, springs, sapphire crystals, and straps are bought in, for obvious reasons.

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