Bia » #buildingawatch

Getting Good Press Fit

Rebecca Mair Lowery — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 20:00:15 +0000

This one’s for all our development and process lovers out there:

What’s a press fit, you ask?

Check out this clip from How It’s Made (season 10, episode 13).

This week in prototypes, it’s all about getting the watch’s glass to fit into its case just right in order to achieve maximum integrity of the case and waterproof protection for the watch. That and it needs to be strong enough to withstand being pressed together. This perfect fit is coming down to just the right gasket width and case material. Of course this isn’t easy because we’ve defied convention by moving away from the typical watch design of round cases and domed faces. Fortunately for us and all of you, we have an awesome mechanical engineer who’s done watch design and manufacturing for over a decade and we couldn’t be better prepared to push the design envelope and achieve our vision. Next up: testing our manufacturing prototypes for press fit durability. Bring it.

Bia Watch Design Animation

Rebecca Mair Lowery — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 03:42:15 +0000

Here’s a fun look at how the Bia watch is coming together:

Thinking About Trade-offs

Rebecca Mair Lowery — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 06:49:56 +0000

Last week we shared our excitement over the successful testing of our Go Stick’s GPS receptivity. This week, the Go Stick is at the center of our latest challenge.

As we’ve been nailing down the details for manufacturing, we’ve discovered that the Go Stick’s design needs some reconfiguring to best protect its parts as they come off the line so they aren’t compromised, or even broken, in the manufacturing process. Unfortunately, this reconfiguring means we need to make a big decision. One option is to reconfigure in such a way that the Go Stick is bigger than originally designed. It would still be small and fit into our pockets, but it wouldn’t be as small, and it wouldn’t be the compact product we envisioned. The other choice is to choose materials that will maintain our original ‘smaller than a pack of gum’ dimensions, but that could also run the risk of some delay, which could mean that everything from field testing to final ship dates could be bumped out by a few weeks. What to do?!

Ultimately, we are focused on delivering the product we promised as close as possible to the time we estimated, and obviously, protecting the quality of the materials in our product is our top priority. But not so obvious is, if push comes to shove, which do we give up: the integrity of our design, or the reliability of our estimated delivery dates? We believe in our design, but we are also loyal to–and very fond of–you, our backers and customers, and we hate asking any of you to wait. We are beyond anxious to see our watch on everyone’s wrists.

After spending the last week sporting a mock Go Stick in the larger size, we’re pretty sure we’ve made our decision and we will definitely announce it loud and clear when all is set. In the meantime, which way would you go?