The Grönefeld brothers, Tim and Bart, have been friends with Kari Voutilainen since the early 1990s. According to Grönefeld, the two companies would often share booths at important watch fairs around the globe. And now they are officially collaborating together, by way of Voutilainen producing bespoke engine turned (guilloché) dials – two of which are shown here – for a limited number of Grönefeld 1941 Remontoire timepieces.
Grönefeld is able to offer a wide array of color and pattern options for the dial, all featuring guilloché-work. And there is even an option to add enameling on top of the guilloché motif as well.
The dials are made on a very old rose-engine that requires the expert skill of someone like Voutilainen, who is world renowned for producing this type of dial. Each dial can take up to two days to produce, and any error or slip of the hand when manually operating the machine could ruin the dial and require the process to be restarted from scratch.
According to the company, “Grönefeld is able to offer a vast choice of coloured and patterned dials. The dials are engine-turned, sometimes referred to as guilloché dials. This process confers each dial with its own unique appearance. To augment the allure of the engine-turned patterns, another even more exclusive technique can be applied, enamelling. The colourful and transparent enamel is applied to the dial surface to bestow a profound depth and lustre to the guilloché patterns.
The words ‘engine turned’ might suggest that a computer-aided machine is used to make the patterns, but nothing is further from the truth. The dials are actually made on a century old machine. Every decorative line is made at very slow speed by deft hand and the skilful precision of a well-trained eye. It actually takes a few days of painstaking and patient effort to produce just one guilloché dial.
