Nicholas Hacko

Nicholas Hacko is a third-generation watchmaker whose family's trade traces back to his grandfather, Mihajlo Hacko, who began his apprenticeship in what was then Yugoslavia in the late 1930s and was running his own watch repair and retail business by 1951; Mihajlo trained Nicholas's father, who trained Nicholas, and Nicholas has in turn trained his own son, Josh, who today oversees manufacturing and the technical side of the business. In 2011, major Swiss watch groups moved to restrict the supply of spare parts to independent watchmakers worldwide, closing every Australian servicing account within six months and effectively ending third-party repair of their watches in the country. When Nicholas asked a Swiss company what it would take to regain access, he was told he was too old, too dumb, and unwilling to invest in the right equipment — and that even sending Josh to Switzerland for in-house training would change nothing.

In direct response, Nicholas built a watch: an initial nine-piece run called the '0/9,' announced by email newsletter and met with more than 100 orders that same afternoon. Overwhelmed by the response, he redesigned it with custom components sourced from around a dozen overseas suppliers, and the project became the 'rebelde' series — Spanish for 'rebel,' a deliberate statement of defiance against the Swiss monopoly, its name partly inspired by the political icons of Nicholas's own childhood growing up in the former Yugoslavia. Split between 'Pilot's' and 'Control Tower' dial styles, rebelde sold more than 700 pieces over six years, including solid gold and titanium limited runs and the 2017 'rebelde50,' a fifty-year guarantee covering every strap, service, overhaul, and crystal replacement.

Profits from rebelde funded a far more ambitious phase: in 2016, Nicholas and Josh set out to build genuine in-house manufacturing capability from the ground up in their workshop in Brookvale, on Sydney's northern beaches. They imported a Citizen R04 CNC lathe for turning components under 4mm in diameter, a Kern Pyramid Nano five-axis ultra-precision mill for mainplates, bridges and dials, an Affolter AF90 CNC gear-hobbing machine to cut their own gear trains in-house, and a Makino U32J wire EDM system for prototyping and fine components; the workshop now keeps roughly five kilometres of 3mm tool steel on hand, enough to make about 1.6 million screws, since Swiss suppliers wouldn't answer their emails below that minimum order quantity. By 2020 the workshop could produce roughly 85 percent of a watch on-site. The NH1, released in 2019 in a sold-out run of 25, became the first watch ever manufactured in Australia: a 45mm titanium case with 52mm lug-to-lug and 48 hours of power reserve, its gold-plated manual-wind going train and oscillator based on the ETA/Unitas 6498 but its mainplate, bridges, and auxiliary components designed and machined entirely in-house.

That same year the NH2 pushed further still, becoming the first wristwatch in existence to use Timascus® in its internal components. Timascus is a hand-forged, vacuum-forged laminate of Grade 2, 3, and 5 titanium sourced from Utah supplier AKS — the Hackos placed their first order of three bars with the company's Chuck Bybee — and its colour comes from a proprietary anodisation process so sensitive to temperature, humidity, and voltage that the Hackos describe it as more art than science, meaning no two NH2 dials or three-quarter bridges are ever quite the same. The hand-guilloché pattern engraved directly onto the NH2's three-quarter bridge was, according to Josh Hacko, itself a first for the material; chamfers are hand-polished in the Swiss style of anglage, jewel holes gently rounded, and the top surface lapped to a mirror finish. Sold in J12 and J13 dial variants, mainplate tolerances run as tight as ±3 microns, and after full assembly every NH2 undergoes two weeks of supervised wear-testing on a watch winder before delivery. Fewer than fifty are built a year, each to special order, one piece at a time.

The NH3 followed in 2021, adding an in-house guilloché titanium dial and hand set alongside a Timascus crown-wheel component; cased at 45mm with a 55mm lug-to-lug, a see-through titanium back, croco-leather straps, and 10 bar of water resistance, its gold-plated brass movement runs on 36 hours of reserve, with rhodium plating offered as a 500 AUD custom option. The NH55, a 16-piece limited series roughly four years in development, went further again, combining the workshop's Curl Curl guilloché pattern directly onto a Timascus dial for the first time anywhere — no watchmaker had previously guilloché-engraved the material itself. In 2021, the precision-machining expertise behind all of this was formalised into NH Micro, a contract-manufacturing arm now serving clients in medicine, quantum computing, semiconductors, optics, and space and telescope instrumentation.

The current catalogue splits between two case families. The Mark 1 is a 40mm, Sydney-assembled pilot's-style watch built around a Swiss-made Soprod M100 automatic movement (28,800bph, 42-hour power reserve, hacking seconds), serviced from the workshop's own address at 67 Castlereagh Street. The Mark II 'Curl Curl' is the manufacturing flagship: named for the beach nearest the workshop and refined through more than twenty design iterations, it takes its spirit from a line Mihajlo Hacko himself put into words in 2017 — that to be born a watchmaker is itself a kind of curse, an endless and ultimately unattainable pursuit of perfection.

The Mark II's Grade 5 titanium dial set — guilloché base dial cut on a Kern Micro HD, applied numerals, and hands — is finished in a technique the Hackos call 'feathering,' a 45-degree surface-ground texture inspired by the coastal birds of Sydney's Northern Beaches, applied to hands faceted at a 4-degree angle; an error of just 10 micrometers in the facet is enough to visibly throw off the symmetry. Cased at 40mm in 316L steel with a double-domed, double-AR-coated sapphire crystal over the same Soprod M100 movement (40-hour reserve), the Mark II is priced at 7,900 AUD, with total production across the entire NH and Mark lineup capped at roughly 50 to 100 watches a year. The workshop's daily newsletter — Nicholas's original sales channel back in 2011 — has since grown past 12,000 subscribers with an open rate above 60 percent, a following the Hackos credit for making Australia's only watch manufacture commercially viable at all, describing the challenge as being like breeding kangaroos on top of Mont Blanc.