Dafuq are you supposed to do with this shit? There are hundreds of movements that have been "open sourced" due to patents expiring; plenty of them have shop drawings available. The issue is the people who want watch movements to be "open source" have neither the tooling nor the skill to actually.... you know... make watch movements.

I mean look. Here's a 6497 in Solidworks. Apparently Weiss thought you could use that to, you know, like, make 6497s. He bought a Fanuc Robodrill and a Tornos Swissnano based on that assumption (that's $400k worth of machine tools for those keeping track at home). And then he discovered that really it's someone's best guess as to what a 6497 looks like. And even if it's perfect if you don't nail a dozen different things it won't even tell time. And that set him back... a while. Not that he didn't lie about it.

This shit is fucking hard to do. You learn that when you take them apart. If you really want to get fancy about it, you take apart a lot of them and measure. What I discovered from taking apart four tongji is that you can have a full-bore micromachine shop and your yields are still 10-20%. I've taken apart things hella more advanced than anything I'll ever be kitted up for and they simply don't work. Frickin' Richard Mille's yields are like 60% and those things sell for an average of $150k.

I haven't spent two months negotiating for a 30-year-old Kern because I'm an elitist prick, I did it because it's the only way to get something capable of holding a micron for less than $150k. Am I going to "open source" anything I do? You know what? Fukkit if I ever make a movement I'll publish the goddamn drawings because the barrier to entry isn't the knowledge it's the fucking tools. 'cuz yeah - you can make a watch movement with your bullshit Boley sewing machine motor and some riffler files but you can't make one in less than weeks and you know what? "things that fit in your palm that skilled artisans slaved over for weeks" is hipster hate-bait par excellence.