PROCESSING
Taking on the
titanium challenge.
CITIZEN watches have always been distinguished by their beautiful cases. That's especially true for our titanium cases. We saw titanium's potential as a material way back in the 1960s and started to use it for cases and bracelets in 1970. Soft, viscous and sticky, titanium is not an easy metal to process. We devoted a lot of effort to developing special in-house processing technologies to overcome its challenges.
Pursuing a beauty
unique to CITIZEN.
Watch cases pass through three key processes: stamping, cutting and polishing. CITIZEN has its own techniques for each one. Take stamping as an example. Not only do we use presses that we have tweaked and improved over decades, we also know the perfect temperature for making soft and viscous titanium materials easier to press into shape. As a result, we can manufacture cases that combine precision with character. At the polishing stage, meanwhile, skilled craftsmen expertly polish each individual case by hand.
CITIZEN makes
its own tools and abrasives.
Polishing is a three-stage process involving rough grinding, middle polishing and finishing. All these tasks demand precise and meticulous craftsmanship beyond the capabilities of any machine. At CITIZEN, our skilled craftsmen call on years of experience to refine their polishing techniques. They have not only developed their own substrates for sallaz polishing, they have created customised jigs to hold whatever they are polishing, and come up with original blends of polishing wax as well. CITIZEN has achieved superior quality with beautiful mirror finishes that defy imitation, particularly with titanium materials. Creating more beautiful watches: it's a pursuit that never ends.
It's beautiful.
And it's strong too.
SuperTitaniumTM is one of the unique new materials that CITIZEN has created. By applying our proprietary surface-hardening treatment Duratect to hand-processed solid-titanium, we achieve a hardness more than five times that of stainless steel. Because the resulting material is scratch-resistant, lightweight, gentle on the skin and resistant to rust, it is used for many CITIZEN watches. From Duratect DLC (highly scratch-resistant and smooth to the touch) to light-toned Duratect Sakura Pink, we have created multiple versions of Super TitaniumTM to match different watch concepts, each offering different colours, different hardness levels, and different kinds of charm.