Joshua Shapiro starts his day as a watchmaker and finishes it as a high school principal. The self-taught founder of J.N. Shapiro Watches makes his recently launched Infinity Series pieces on a vintage hand-operated rose-engine machine. It can take him a week just to complete the guilloche engraving on the seconds sub-dial, a pattern he created that he calls the Infinity Weave. “It’s basically a basket weave, and within each square it’s an even tinier basket weave. There are very few people on the planet doing guilloche engraving. It’s just insanely difficult to do,” says Shapiro, who uses a German-made movement for his 42 mm manually wound timepieces.
23
October