Anglage on the Hidden Bridge

There is a moment in the assembly of a very expensive watch that no customer will ever witness, and that is rather the point of it. Anglage is the craft of bevelling the edges of a movement's components. A watchmaker takes a steel lever or a brass bridge, files a chamfer along its border at roughly 45 degrees, then polishes that narrow ribbon with wood and diamond paste until it throws light like a filament. On a good movement this takes hours. On a great one it takes days. And a meaningful portion of that work is performed on the underside of bridges, on the flanks of springs, on surfaces that face inward toward the mainplate and will not be seen again until someone disassembles the entire watch, which in practice means a stranger, in a different city, several decades from now. The owner will never see it. The owner cannot see it. The owner has spent the price of a small car specifically on the parts of the object that are unavailable to him. This is, I would argue, the cleanest…