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An interesting announcement from a Swiss watch firm's CEO.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9EVUvQ2 ... AAAAPAAUAA

Hublot and EPFL presented Thursday December 15, 2011 the Magic 18-carat Gold, which required three years of work and research to be developed.

Precious metal par excellence, gold has the disadvantage of being too soft, thus prone to scratches. Hublot claims to have developed "the hardest gold in the world", that "only a diamond can scratch" with the collaboration of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Normal 18-carat gold is 400 Vickers (the most frequently used unit for calculating the hardness of a metal), the company said in a statement. The new Hublot Gold rises about 1000 Vickers, far above hardened steel, which is around 600 Vickers.

The feat was made ​​possible by the addition of ceramics. A boron carbide powder is first shaped by cold isostatic pressing into molds approaching the final shape of the parts.

Gold in fusion is then infiltrated at very high pressure. The metal will then fill the pores of the ceramic, thus producing the new material which has 75% gold in it, enough to be still considered as 18-carat gold. To produce this new material, Hublot has created a special foundry.

The first watches made ​​of Magic Gold will be presented next year at BaselWorld.

Here are some excerpts in French:

http://www.tsr.ch/video/info/journal-continu/?direct=1#/info/journal-19h30/3654138-sous-l-impulsion-de-l-horloger-jean-claude-biver-l-epfl-developpe-un-or-d-un-genre-nouveau.html

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- This is Ghost Rider requesting a fly-by. - Negative Ghost Rider. The pattern is full.

Let's merge the two topics.....

Why not?

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- This is Ghost Rider requesting a fly-by. - Negative Ghost Rider. The pattern is full.

I wonder what's the marketing to hard science ratio. I had a Sinn U1 fully tegimented (kolsterized). It was suppose to be impervious to superficial scratches on the metal, the way they described it it should take a good beating before scratches show up. I managed to scratch the tegimented bracelet holding my arm out the car window.