The 15th of December was a very special day for the Hublot Manufacture in Nyon. They announced the launch of a completely new scratch-resistant alloy that they will use in their future watch-production. The chief executive of Hublot, Jean-Claude Biver, was the one to do the announcement that they managed to create a new type of noble gold that has been graded 18-carat by the Central Office for Precious Metals Control.
This new type of alloy is derived from 24k gold, with added high-tech materials. It’s simply the world’s first golden alloy that provides great resistance to scratches, of up to 1,000 Vickers (it seriously means a lot for a gold alloy, given the facts that steel measures 600 Vickers and regular gold 400). It’s surpassed by ceramic materials though, these ones being known to measure 1,200-2,000 Vickers, some of them exceeding 10,000.
There is a good reason for which watch-manufacturers never use 24k gold for the cases and 18k gold has only seldom been used for these purposes. Gold is extremely easy to scratch and even if it doesn’t, its shine tends to fade off in time, thus it needs constant polishing.
The secret ingredient that made gold a lot more resistant is boron carbide, a component used in creating ceramics. Due to the fact that carbide is a porous material, it allows a 75 percent pure gold metal of the contents of the final composite material. The first watch that incorporates this kind of scratch resistant gold will be presented in 2012, at Basel World.
[Hublot]
