Australia’s only watchmaker Nicholas Hacko Watchmaker has completed a series of watches to demonstrate the company’s capabilities. Here Josh Hacko looks back at a big 18 months for the small company.
I love giving a bit of a backstory, and glimpse behind the curtain into our projects. The NH55 project, which you can see in the photo, has plenty of good yarns!
The NH55 project started late 2022, after many years of brewing in our minds.
Our small team decided that we should go all-out and create a series of watches with Timascus dials in a spectrum of colors.
This would be our statue-in-time for our capability as Australia’s only watch manufacturer.
This series of watches would represent our ability to design, engineer, manufacture, assemble, and service a watch, from scratch, in Australia.
Timascus was the cherry on top, it was the unique challenge we had to solve. No watchmaker had ever tackled timascus as a material for dials and movements.
Timascus is a 3-part titanium alloy, forge welded by hand, that can be anodised through heat or electricity to grow oxide layers that change its colour.
We knew instantly that we wanted to create a full spectrum of colors in timascus, but the failure rate of working in such a fickle, challenging, and completley organically patterned material meant that we would have to settle with whatever our process gave us.
After 18 months of manufacutring, decorating and assembling more than 80% of the parts in the NH55, in May 2024 we finished a series of 16 watches.
The 16 watches would then go all around the world, some staying in Australia, most flying abroad, and this photo that you see here, is the last time all 16 watches were in the same place at the same time.
18 months of work, all in one place!
Josh Hacko is Technical Director at NH Micro and Nicholas Hacko Watchmaker
Picture: Nicholas Hacko Watchmaker/Timascus series