Our Commitment to Service
The Art of Restoration
Maintaining watches over 45 years old requires specialized skills and techniques safeguarded and transmitted exclusively by Patek Philippe’s Geneva-based restoration workshop.
Our Commitment
Spare Parts Archive
The Art of Restoration
Pivoting
If some parts needed to restore an antique watch are unavailable, our watchmaker-restorers will recreate them by hand. For example, our skilled pivot makers can manually rebuild all the axes and wheels of a watch using original tools, ensuring precise restoration through expert craftsmanship.
At Patek Philippe, ancestral know-how is preserved and passed down without interruption, using time-honored methods. A dedicated workshop is entirely devoted to the restoration of pivots, safeguarding this rare expertise.
The Face-lathe
The Pivoting lathe
To verify the dimension, they use a hand micrometer and a comparator, both of these mesuring tools are easily precise to one hundredth of a milimeter. This highly meticulous work is carried out under a 12x magnifying loupe, demanding exceptional focus and dexterity.
The Pivot Maker's tools
The Jacot Tool
This process not only smooths the surface but also compresses and hardens the metal by pressing a burnisher on the pivots as it turns. The degree of precision is remarkable: the pivot’s diameter measures as little as 7 hundredths of a millimeter — roughly the width of a human hair. To measure such diameter, they use pivot gauges, a precision measuring tool with holes differing by just 2 microns.
The Rounding Machine
The calipers
