Innovation & technology

What distinguishes a Glashütte watch from other watches is the movement. It is of the utmost importance in the German watchmaking town. And so there are also some special features that are characteristic of a Glashütte movement: The three-quarter plate is one of them. Introduced in 1864, it is now considered a typical feature of high-quality Glashütte watches. Our three-quarter plate, newly developed in 2008, is used in Mühle movements with the designation “MU 94-“.

Another traditional feature is the swan-neck fine adjustment, which lives on in our woodpecker-neck fine adjustment, which is particularly shock-resistant. Finally, we would like to mention the screw-down gold chatons with their magnificent play of colors in red, blue and gold. They find an appropriate home in the traditionally oriented and finely finished Robert Mühle calibers of our manufacture line.

For a watch to function reliably and precisely for a long time, all components of the movement must work together perfectly: from the drive to the gear train to the adjustment. That is why we have not only developed our own fine adjustment, we also pay the utmost attention to the rotor.

The Mühle rotor provides the drive for our automatic watches. Set in motion by the wearer’s arm movements, it uses its rotation to wind the watch. To ensure that this happens efficiently, we manufacture it according to our designs on our own CNC machining centers. Because even here, everything has to be just right and manufactured to the tightest tolerances. Our rotor consists of the engraved center segment and a special heavy metal semi-tire that reinforces the rotor’s ability to rotate downward due to the earth’s gravity.

This flywheel is riveted to the outer circumference of the center segment with four or five gold-colored rivets. In its center we press a low-friction ball bearing, since the bearing of the rotor is particularly stressed by the constant movement. Finally, the rotor is nickel-plated or rhodium-plated, i.e. coated with an extremely thin layer of an element from the platinum group of metals. This gives it its shiny silver insensitive surface.

The three-quarter plate is a typical feature of high-quality Glashütte watches. It serves as a stable bearing for the mainspring barrel and wheel train and is so named because it covers about three quarters of the movement. As is tradition, we have equipped our three-quarter plate with the classic Glashütte stopwork and a removable escape wheel bridge.

The latter not only looks very nice – with its red bearing jewel and the two blued screws. Above all, it facilitates a revision of the watch, because the escape wheel or even the entire escapement can be removed and cleaned more easily. With the three-quarter plate, we were able to increase the longevity, serviceability and aesthetics of our chronograph movements. And because we not only install our three-quarter plate in them, but also designed the regulation, balance cock, automatic bridge and rotor for them ourselves, we proudly stamp our own caliber designations on them.

We are watchmakers first and foremost. All the work we do on a movement is first and foremost to make our timepieces more precise and reliable. So we do what we do with our watches not just for aesthetic reasons, but primarily for functional reasons. Functional aesthetics is what we call it.

All moving parts in a watch movement are subject to a certain amount of wear – but the smoother the gear train runs, the less of it. That is why metal surfaces are compacted, hardened and polished. The very beautiful polishes in particular provide the surface of levers and springs with more density and tension in the process: for the benefit of greater precision.

The hand-wound movements of the “R. Mühle & Sohn” manufactory line were designed entirely in the spirit of traditional Glashütte watchmaking. Thus, for the first time, an engraved balance cock and colorful screwed gold chatons can be admired in these Mühle movements.

In terms of fine adjustment and cover plate, the manufacture calibers – in contrast to the Glashütte movement technology common today – go their own way. Naturally, our further development of the swan-neck fine adjustment is used in them: the particularly shock-resistant and woodpecker neck fine adjustment, developed by Mühle-Glashütte. The cover plate was also designed as a three-fifths plate with a separate cock for the escape wheel.