Review: Minhoon Yoo

This watch is not the most impressive watch ever made. There’s not just one problem with it; there are many. Even so, it is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen. This is the story of a guy who decided he was going to make his own watch.

The Making Of Watches

In an area of the world we affectionally call “The West”, we take a lot for granted. One of those things you might not expect is watchmaking. WOSTEP, the BHI, the NAWCC—there’s a litany of places you and I can go if we get a hankering for some watchmakering.

For Minhoon Yoo, born and raised in South Korea, things were a little bit different. There are many things that South Korea does very well—cars, tech, cinema, for example—but watchmaking isn’t one of them. So when Yoo found himself watching a Japanese watchmaking documentary called Masters of Time, he had a bit of a problem on his hands.

It was a discovery of the kind that had all the makings of ruining Yoo’s life. A skill no one in Korea possessed set in an industry that didn’t exist. Of course, Korean people know about and buy watches—it’s not another planet—but making them for themselves? It’s as ridiculous as asking the UK to make an affordable car that won’t rust on the way to the dealership.

Nevertheless, Yoo was bitten. Deep in the middle of an art degree, he pressed his teachers to show him the ropes of basic machining. They obliged, and for Yoo, that was it, signed, sealed and delivered. He had to become a watchmaker.

Of course, when he decided to spend every penny he had purchasing broken machining equipment, his friends and family naturally thought he’d gone nuts. He had squeezed himself into a room that became his home—that’s no exaggeration, there’s a bed in the corner—and there he set about making himself a watchmaker. By watching videos. On YouTube. About watchmaking.

Step one: restore the machines he had purchased. This is the ultimate chicken and egg scenario, because how do you manufacture parts for a 100-year-old machine when the machine you need to make them is the one you’re trying to fix? The answer: as best you can. Crudely formed parts adorn these machines to this day, breathing a new lease of life into them—or at least keeping them on life support.

The first part Yoo made was a hand. That’s it. A simple hand, as dictated by George Daniels in his seminal book, Watchmaking, a publication that has become a rite of passage for any budding watchmaker. The hand Yoo made wasn’t perfect, or even close—but it had come into existence by his own making, and that was it. Yoo took a breath and did something that, culturally, may not seem like a big deal to many people in the world, but to him, meant everything: he told his dad he wanted to become a watchmaker.

His dad, being a dad, thought he wanted to change watch batteries. Yoo made him watch Masters of Time. His dad, still being a dad, still did not get it. But he did agree to it, helping Yoo buy the remaining equipment he needed to get started making his very first watch.

From Nothing To Something

Personally, I think the internet is both the best and worst thing to happen to humanity. It’s a segregator, an agitator, a poisoner of minds; yet conversely it’s also an educator, an incubator and a community builder. Everything I know about anything comes purely from the internet, without exception. It has the power to turn even a young man all alone in his field out in South Korea into a watchmaker.

Obviously, it’s easier to fly to Switzerland and join WOSTEP, but the choice for Yoo was either that or the equipment he needed to make watches. The internet, on the other hand, was free, and so Yoo continued to immerse himself into every single scrap of knowledge he could find. From Roger Smith’s excellent YouTube series, to Instagram snaps, to pausing on manufacturer adverts to see what equipment he could spy in a single frame, Yoo filled his brain with knowledge. All he had to do now was put it into practice.

To graduate from college, Yoo made a watch. I haven’t seen that watch, and I can only imagine that the absence of its presence in the conversation with the man was as much akin to why I won’t show you the first novel I wrote. It’s not for human eyes for fear of turning them to acid.

Nevertheless, it served a purpose. Well, two purposes: one, it got him over the finish line of his art course, and two, it cemented in Yoo’s mind that he was capable of producing a watch. Now he just needed to figure out the harder part of the eighty-twenty rule: making a world class watch.

And after five years of learning, what we have here is Yoo’s first public creation—what he calls “The Carved Piece”. Now, before we get into how’s, where’s and whys, we have to solve a problem: what’s Yoo actually going to do with this watch? He faced the very real issue of making something, investing in something, that was as saleable as salt to a sea lion.

The people of Korea didn’t want his watch—and neither did the people of everywhere else, either. Except for one man, a German friend Yoo had made along the way, a man who was either brave or stupid or both—a man who invested enough into Yoo’s future to keep him putting one foot in front of the other.

Now, with the very real possibility of letting down not just friend, but a customer, Yoo needed to get on and make a watch that could compete with those of his heros. Only, that turned out to be a lot harder than he expected. The problem was twofold: one, he didn’t know how to do it, and two, his equipment wasn’t good enough.

Usually, parts are CNC’d to within a few nanometres of their final shape and finished by hand, but for Yoo, who’s eBay special was lucky to get within a few millimetres, he faced a very different challenge. He could form a piece roughly, no problem, but he was faced with a kind of finishing rarely seen these days—basically finishing the job of the CNC machine before applying the final layer of beauty.

He started with a Peseux 7001 as a template, slowly removing parts and redesigning them in his own way. Each one he would try to make as per the instructions he had found online, and each part he would then have to reassess to figure out how to make them with the—ropey at best—equipment he had.

Well, That Was Harder Than I Was Expecting

Nothing went smoothly. Nothing. Yoo’s first decision was to replace the bridges of the 7001 with those of his own design, wrought from nickel silver for a denser, more unique look. You can see between his current and an earlier prototype the difference that makes. And you would think that making such a thing, terrible CNC machine notwithstanding, would be straightforward.

But no. Not everything is shown in a watchmaking documentary, and Yoo quickly learned that a flat piece of metal soon turns curlier than a pig’s tail when you start to put some work into it. Puzzled by this annoying outcome, Yoo turned to the internet for help again, learning how sheet metal is strained in its molecular makeup by the very process of stretching it into long, thin pieces.

And so he had to heat-treat them first to force them to bend, relieving the strain inside, then re-flatten them and then begin the machining process. With a rough blank in hand, he was then able to slowly and surely file the shape down to its final form under the light of a microscope. Many, many mistakes were made. The learning curve was steeper than the white cliffs of Dover.

Yoo continued to learn, working around problems he faced day after day, littering his workshop with prototype parts and handmade tools he’d forged to try and overcome his issues. He found himself drilling jewel holes on a lathe because his pillar drill wasn’t accurate enough; fashioning hand tools to cut corners his CNC machine couldn’t; building jigs to polish screwheads with.

Speaking of screwheads, the screws you see here are the originals from the 7001, which you can see on the earlier protoype are rounded on top. Yoo wanted them flat, black polished, so he decided to shave the tops off each of them, creating not just a flat, but perpendicular surface. I can see from his eyes that each and every detail tells a story of repeated frustration and eventual satisfaction. Dark Souls has nothing on teaching yourself to be a watchmaker.

As Yoo became more courageous, he modified the movement further. Refinishing the crown and ratchet wheels, including polishing every single tooth. Black polishing the bevels on the plates, and further machining a custom baseplate. A new, one piece click spring, louder and more satisfying to wind, was crudely spat out by his CNC machine and further worked by hand. Trial and error became Yoo’s mantra; without a beautifully flush fit right out the machine, it was left to him to file microns away at a time to get the flush meeting between spring and plate, to maintain a uniform thickness across the spring’s length. With a modern expectation of watchmaking in my mind, it’s work that doesn’t show. The funny thing is, it’s not work that Yoo seems keen to boast about either.

It took some serious probing to turn, “I finished it by hand” into, “I sweated day and night over this thing to make it work”, and I wonder if that humility is again something culturally different, or perhaps just Yoo’s own humble demeanour. I can’t stress enough just how passionate this guy is about his work, literally surrounded by it all day and night. There’s something of a Bladerunner-esque retro-future to his workshop, filled on all levels with equipment of varying ages, tools he’s fashioned himself, and parts he’s either worked on, working on, or yet to start. And there he is, perched in the middle of it, beaming from ear to ear.

Dialling It In

The part of Yoo that got him to where he was today, the part that sent him to art school, hadn’t completely been eradicated in favour of making a watch. He was as fascinated by the work he could achieve on the front as well as the back, and so the dial of his watch became a canvas from which he could communicate all the hard work he seemed so initially reluctant to share.

He was inspired by the idea of ambiguity, that a single object could have different meanings for different people, and that informed the dial you see today, with its randomised markers circling the edge. You may have been wondering what they’re supposed to be—it’s a question, it seems, that only you can answer.

Artistry aside, the manufacturing of the dial was a whole headache of its very own. Initially, Yoo’s prototypes where carved from a single piece, as you can see here, but he quickly realised he would do better by upping the complexity and making them from multiple. In the back you’ll see bleached silver, hand carved from the outside in with a pattern that borrows from the A. Lange & Söhne Handwerksunst school of thinking.

Layered on top of that are four silver plates, this time non-bleached: the hour ring, seconds ring, name plate and serial plate. You might notice some of the markers are blue: those are the polished ends of the blued screws Yoo made to hold them in place from the back. I can think of easier ways to have made it, but Yoo went with the harder way.

You might have also noticed that the seconds ring isn’t entirely concentric, thicker on side than it is the other. Yoo admits that to finish the prototype in time for its tour around the world, he had to rush that part. He admonishes himself for not taking longer with it and promises the final will be perfect, but to me that further enhances the reality that this thing is hand made.

Understanding that each part can be made very wrong shows just how much effort is expressed in making them right. Think about the sub-dial itself, recessed into the silver so the seconds hand clears the crystal. How the dial is hand carved in relief to fit the plates perfectly. How the hands are shaped from a rough blank to their final forms by Yoo’s own fingers, including the one-piece inner bevel on the minute hand.

I ask Yoo why the seconds ring shows just two indices between each five second marker and not four. He laughs, admitting he’d never been caught out on that before. His pillar drill, he reminds me, isn’t accurate enough to make smaller holes. He wants to get a better one so he can.

That, to me, summarises this entire watch. At $18,000, it seems like a big ask for such an unknown, and laid out on paper, with its catalogue case and crown, Peseux movement base and lack of complication, it seems like a ridiculous sum of money. It’s true, many, many people will see that price and be put off. But some people, enough people, have taken the time to get to know Yoo and they understand that they’re buying into something more than just a watch made by machine and finished by hand. They’re buying into a man with a goal to turn Korea into a watchmaking landmark—a man who, above all else, wants to make his dad proud.

There’s Always Something More

That, as it happens, is far from the end of the story. As I said, this is a prototype. Rather than showing us a final product, Yoo is giving us a rarely-seen opportunity to see how the sausage is made—and in Yoo’s case specifically, made over and over again until it’s right.

There’s plenty more to go. For instance, the case, crown and buckle aren’t made by Yoo. He’s refinished the buckle to match the nameplate, evoking a traditional Korean design inspired by a swallow’s tail. Of course, he wants to make it all himself, but the next step will be to refinish a purchased item—and then to go further and create his own.

And the movement, the 7001. Parts remain inside that still exhibit the hallmarks of their original manufacturer. Yoo intends to equally refinish and reproduce these items to a standard he is happy with. The wheels, for example, are coarsely blasted right now. He is currently, as of this very moment, learning how to grain and bevel them. You can see his progress over on his Instagram. Once he has mastered that, he will put his hand in his pocket and invest in the machinery that allows him to build them from scratch.

The pallet bridge, escapement, balance wheel—everything that’s been left untouched is going through a process of receiving treatment by the Minhoon Yoo school of learning by doing. It’s not a binary state of no watch, and then watch. It’s an evolving journey that I feel privileged to be a part of.

The most fascinating part for me is that journey Yoo has taken to get here. He credits watchmakers far and wide for the inspiration not just of his work, but his processes. He talks in awe of both the smaller independents and the larger, better-established brands for both being able to achieve such exquisite standards in both low volumes and high. He names the independents who have taken the time to help him overcome problems personally. Spending time with him is like going to a spa that specialises in rejuvenating enthusiasm.

There was a moment, when talking about the division of the dial into equidistant markers, that Yoo referred to George Daniels’ book once more, citing a method Daniels used to eyeball their placement. Yoo was so enthused to find a method that didn’t require CNC machinery he couldn’t afford, that allowed him to replicate the work of his hero within the confines of his own workshop.

I don’t think I’ve ever loved watchmaking as much as I did in that moment. I was talking to a man on the other side of the world breaking down his process for producing the very thing—not a thing like it, the very thing—I held in my hands, explaining how he’d used an outdated method favoured by a legendary watchmaker not just because he admired the man so much, but because it was the right step for him in his journey right now.

Where does that journey go next? After the Carved Piece? Yoo has intentions of building his own movement from scratch, and I don’t really need to tell you I’m convinced he’s going to do it. It’ll be an uphill battle for him for sure, but even in the short time I got to spend talking to him, I can tell you that’s not a problem. If anything, that’s the entire reason he’s doing it.