Uhrwerke – Eine Leidenschaft
As with a number of manufacturers in the watch and jewelry town of Pforzheim, the history of Kasper & Co., founded in 1911 by Karl and Christine Kasper, did not begin with watches, but with elastic straps for watches. This first of two articles about Kasper & Co. outlines the history of the company, while the second part deals with its watch movements.
I like models that illustrate the functioning of certain components of a watch movement in enlarged form. These movement models originated in watchmaking schools, where particularly high-quality examples were produced as study objects and showpieces.
Today I’m showing you something much simpler, namely models of a Swiss lever escapement and of a tourbillon, both from the 3D printer.
More than ten years ago, the German watch forum Uhrforum.de began collecting movements that were not listed in other online movement identifiers. From the individual contributions, I have compiled all movements sorted by size on a website and as a PDF document at longer intervals.
Some time ago, in the article System Glashütte – What’s that?, I explained where the term System Glashütte comes from and why it has more to do with Switzerland than with Glashütte. Naturally, the Swiss manufacturers of movements that were supposed to suggest that they were from Glashütte usually had no interest in leaving their company name on these movements. Accordingly, in some cases it is difficult to find the manufacturer or an exact caliber designation.
This time I don’t have any interesting technical information about movements to offer, but ask my readers for help in identifying watch movements.
In 1950, IWC launched the automatic calibers 81 (small seconds) and 85 (center second) with a new automatic winding system developed by Albert Pellaton. I was able to get hold of a 5:1 scale model of this winding system made by IWC and present it to you here, as it illustrates the functioning of the Pellaton winding system particularly clearly.
