That's about three hours on a rose engine and a straight line engine. I have a friend who sells watches with similar. His first dial took him 100 hours. nowadays they take about 40.

The third one would probably be pretty great. It's not what i want to do with my life, though.

Fundamentally, guilloche is ornamental metalwork. Fundamentally, jewellery and watchmaking are ornamental metalwork. The tricky thing is, because the sunk time is an important part of the cost, and because individual innovation has largely vanished, there's an entire -

I mean, okay. It's like this. If you were a jeweler in 1915, you knew a lot of different ways to make things. If you were a watchmaker in 1915, you knew a lot of different ways to make things. If you were a machinist in 1915, you knew a lot of different ways to make things. And a lot of those things were the same. But as technology advanced, and as commerce grew more global, and as specialization became the survival strategy in a mechanized world, the machinist forgot the stuff he learned from jewellery. The jeweler forgot the stuff he learned from watchmaking. And the watchmaker clutches his ancient tools to his chest and spits in the eye of anyone suggesting there are advantages to modern progress.

And there's no one who can synthesize a decent new piece of jewellery.

Here's a pair of Pierre Sterle brooches from the '50s, probably for Boucheron:

Here's a lizard from Zales.

Now - the Sterle brooches probably cost ten times as much. But there's... life to them. And it comes from knowing a few different ways to do things, and not being wedded to tradition, and being able to step out of your lane.

There's undoubtedly a mountain of forgotten works from eras past. We tend to remember the highlights. But I'm recognizing that the opportunity comes from synthesis, from being able to put together all the ways things used to be done in order to make something new, rather than fucking rehashing the Olde Worlde like fuckin' everyone else.

And I'm still sniping 40-year-old Bergeon tools off eBay because shit hasn't changed other than the metallurgy getting crappier.

But it's within my grasp. I can trick a Fanuc Robodrill into making that dial through GCode and M19 spindle alignment. It's been done.