Roger Dubuis

Jonathan writes:

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As many of you know there are several independent artist who create enamel dials for altmost the entire watch industry. Anita Porchet is certainly the most well known amongst them, she does amazing work e.g. for Jaquet Droz, Piaget or others (you may want to read Dr. Michel Ting's report here ). 

However, what makes Roger Dubuis' enamel dials stand out are the non-round, square, rectangular or cushion shaped dials, which are often even curved:

I did not realise the additional complexity and the challenges that are inherent to the creation of non-round dials before I did some research over the last couple of days:

While enamel dials are a delicate speciality per se, creating shaped dials or even curved ones is on a whole different level of complexity and comes with a large range of technical difficulties: The main problem here are the repeated heating and cooling cycles. On a non-round dial, this creates tensions due to uneven thickness of the substrate and may result in deformations which cause enamel layers to break off the substrate. 

Even if such be resolved, varying coefficients of expansion lead to distortion of the enamel which is particularly troublesome if painted numbers, indices or images are applied atop a ground layer of enamel.

But the Manufacture Roger Dubuis did persevere and spend much time and efforts to reaise their vision of spectacular hand-painted shaped dials. I did a quick search on the European patent database and - to my surprise - discovered that RD indeed filed a patent which covers the process of creating shaped enamel dials, particularly such with a curved dial.

European patent #EP 1 554 415 B1 is a fascinating read to those who are interested in such artisanal dials (here is an excerpt that shows the level of detail RD went into):