Sorting through some old QP magazines the other day I came across an article from 2010 about the Calibre 1887 which I thought my readers might like be interested in. I'm sure most of you are aware of the difficult history of the 1887 and this article goes at least some way to mitigating what was something of a PR disaster at the time.
In this article, which also looked at the Breitling Calibre B01, Master Watchmaker Peter Roberts FBHI cast his eye over and give his opinion on the veracity of TAG Heuer's claims regarding the the Calibre 1887 and came down pretty substantially on their side.
The magazine is no longer in existence so hopefully no one will object to me reproducing it here. If you are the copyright holder and you do object then please contact me through the comments below and I will remove the post.
All in the Movement, the TAG Heuer Calibre 1887
TAG Heuer's Calibre 1887 (the movement is named for the year in which Edouard Heuer invented the oscillating pinion) was born into a morass of web-sourced controversy. The company's initial announcement suggested that the design was created completely in-house, sparking immediate negative reactions from aficionados who quickly spotted the resemblance to Seiko's classic TC78. Instead of developing the movement from a clean sheet, TAG Heuer acquired the IP rights to the TC78. As Roberts learned from a meeting with TAG Heuer engineers, the Swiss house has made interesting changes to the movement since starting work on it in 2007.
"Seiko employed this movement in a rather interesting chronograph. It's a column wheel design, with oscillating pinion, which co-incidentally was invented by Heuer in 1887. It's a nice chronograph made in very much the Japanese way. If you look at the automatic winding system, it's classic Seiko: twin arm, twin click cam drive. Any watchmaker (or afficionado) would look at this movement and immediately recognise it as a Seiko, even if it had no other marking on it.
Obviously it uses a Japanese balance/spring, shock absorber - a nice piece, and as usual, as far as Japanese watches are concerned, it's function before form, absolutely. So it's a good-looking piece, but no thrills, no added embellishment. It is a typically Japanese, beautifully engineered, but you don't get that historical touch that the Swiss would give to a watch."
As Roberts analysed the Calibre 1887, he felt that he was looking at a complete rebuild, with wholesale design changes. "TAG Heuer didn't just buy it and change the name plate, as say, British Leyland did with the MG 1100. It is totally their remaking of the movement. As Stephane Linder, TAG Heuer's technical director told us, 'There is only one piece in the entire watch that is not re-manufactured'. He wouldn't tell us what it was, but apparently it's very small!"
What you might call the interface between the base movement and the chronograph works. Effective, if not elegant in engineering terms, the oscillating pinion connects sets of gears by moving the pinion horizontally into contact. Though as Roberts pointed out: "The latest fad is what they call the vertical clutch, which works more like the clutch in a car, allowing you to engage and disengage the chronograph. A third, 'classic' system is to use spur gears, which can be engaged or disengaged using a coupling device.
If you want to compare them, you could say the TAG Heuer system is very good, very effective, and to give it its full credit, it has been used in more chronographs than probably all of the other methods put together - including its use in the 7750. And it is a 'Heuer thing', so it's interesting for them that Seiko just happened to use it quite independently. It's a nice coincidence that brings it full circle."
Roberts acknowledges that TAG Heuer had to do a lot of reverse engineering. "The designers had to disassemble the movement and start from scratch on how to make each part. This is not as easy as people may think. They see what the Chinese are doing, who seem to be able to copy things almost instantaneously. But it's not so easy to reverse engineer something properly and with engineering integrity, which is the way TAG Heuer has done things.
This is a tricky job, but it's still much, much cheaper than designing an entirely new movement from scratch. And the Seiko movement was not just designed for price, it was designed to be built by state of the art automatic machines using the latest manufacturing techniques."
The nine main movement parts, the platine or main plate and all the bridges are made at the Cornol factory in the Swiss Jura. Completely re-equipped with the very latest machinery, this is now one of the most advanced facilities in Switzerland. Main assembly takes place at factories in La Chaux de Fonds, also known as T1 Assembly, again using state of the art equipment. Wheels, jewels and other smaller components are basically out-sourced, as is normal practice throughout the watch industry. Roberts points out that although TAG Heuer could have made everything in-house this would have tripled the price of the watch in which the movement is placed.
"One of the main criteria, as far as I can see, was to get an in-house movement into watches at the same price as the Valjoux 7750 series. And TAG Heuer has pretty much done that, which is quite something. Once upon a time, 7750s were quite cheap to obtain, but now they're relatively expensive so it becomes cost-effective to make movements this way.
TAG Heuer has changed elements in the process of reverse engineering, but it has maintained the classic Seiko wind system, which has been proven in millions of watches over the years. It's pretty fail-safe, so why change it? But they have changed certain things in there - the oscillating pinion, of course, as well as much of the mechanism in the chronograph.
There is now a Swiss Clinergic escapement in there, fast-beat 28,800, and of course the balance assembly is now Swiss with a Nivarox spring, Glucydur balance. Seiko used its own balance, its own springs, its own shock absorber. All these components are now Swiss, while everything including every gear and wheel has been re-engineered and remade.
The platine is also totally different, certain things are in the same place, but everything else about it is different. All of the bridges are different, the rotor, of course is considerably modified, with its own special shape and design, and it has a different bearing. There are more jewels in the movement: 39 as opposed to 35 in the Seiko. They have also changed the motion work and the dimensions of the movement."
Interestingly, after TAG Heuer's reworking, the movement is slightly slimmer at 7.13mm: the Seiko is 7.27mm. Conversely, the diameter of the TAG Heuer is slightly greater, reflecting the bigger watches of today, but not by too much: 29.3mm against 28.4mm. "So it's a nicely sized movement, although not classically slim for a chronograph movement. The El Primero for example, is 6.5mm thick. But nevertheless, it's still a good size and it's not overly large, so it can be put into larger or smaller watchcases.
TAG Heuer uses 22 out sourced Swiss suppliers for making various parts, and as I said, just one part that's from Seiko, the 'mystery part'. But above all, the movement is finished to a proper Swiss standard: Cotes de Geneve, perlage, nice edge finishing with diamond polishing, blued column wheel, nice quality screws - again, all Swiss made and engineered to Swiss specificiation - a very different finish to that used on the original. And above all, the watch performs well."
Roberts doesn't hesitate when he says that "TAG Heuer earned the right to call this an in house movement. If they bought Seiko's movement and just changed the balance, maybe the escapement, and fitted a new rotor, you couldn't say it was 'manufacture'. But I think it's safe to say that this is a TAG Heuer 'manufacture' movement. The reasons? The company has redesigned it completely and makes every significant part of it. What it doesn't make - the jewels, the balance, the mainspring, etc - most manufacturers don't make these either."
Because of the scale of TAG Heuer's operation, it's likely that the company will need every movement it can make. It would be a delicious irony if TAG Heuer could produce enough to supply other brands that weren't able to afford to produce their own calibres in the wake of Swatch's decision to scale back OEM production. With the present factories, TAG Heuer has output capacity for 50,000 movements per year, starting with 25,000 per year, with the plan to increase it by 10,000 per year. At the moment, they're only putting this movement into one range of watches. After that there are likely to be modifications to it and then the movement will be used in other models.
As Roberts says: "To produce this is very expensive, but if you can make 50,000 the costs will come down. And if you can make another 200,000 the costs come down further, so year on year it becomes cost-effective against the increasing cost of acquiring Valjoux movements. This is the main reason why so many companies are introducing in-house movements. I don't think that TAG Heuer would have been quite so spurred on to into doing this if they were without the worries of supply issues from the Swatch Group."
As far as one can see from the figures, TAG Heuer has achieved its goal at a quarter of the cost of starting from scratch. "It's hard to give an exact figure as to what it would cost to develop a movement from a plain sheet of paper, instead of re-developing the Seiko. But thinking in terms of percentages rather than exact development costs TAG Heuer has got it within the the price of the Valjoux."
The proof is the price of the launch watch, Carrera Calibre 1887: it sells for an astonishingly affordable £2350.
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