Hand anglage with 6 internal angles on one component in the Oileán H-B1 Triple Calendar Chronograph by John McGonigle

If something needed replacing it had to be made to fit rather than replaced by an identical part off the shelf. Because components could not be made to high precision in quantity, which would mean that they were interchangeable, each component had to be individually made to fit the components that it was interacting with. That’s what traditional watchmakers used to do. He had taken a piece of raw metal and skillfully transformed it into the exact part required. He gave it a couple of coats of paint and my truck looked brand new. And within a couple of hours, he had transformed the flat metal into a perfect mirror image of the opposite fender. I thought that he must know where he could find an old replacement, but he pulled out a large, flat piece of sheet metal and started hammering (beating) it. I took it to a backstreet panel beater in Delhi, who took one look (well, two: one at the work to be done and another at the fact that I was a relatively rich westerner) and said it would take a couple of hours and around $50 to fix. The panel around the front right wheel was basically destroyed and I had to remove it to be able to turn the wheels. In an earlier life, I was once driving a truck in India and literally had a fender bender.

Modern high-precision machinery has revolutionized the manufacture of mechanical watches as it has nearly everything else.

Wind up pocket watch