Patek Philippe

SuitbertW
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A little bit of general info....

Hello, Mike,

generally most of the todays watch cases are made from a "solid piece" of metall.  If the specific shape allows or even dictates a seperate manufacturing of case
and lugs - soldering (or welding or whatever) them together in a later stage - that applies for some shapes where the lug/case band are well seperated. Somethiing like most
of the Lange cases for example.

A case like your reference 5296 for example where the lugs, at least on one side, smoothly "blend" with the case band is more commonly made from one piece.
Most high quality, precious metall cases are firstly "roughed" out from a more or less thick sheet metall band. That's in most cases done by "stamping". One needs incredbly
strong presses for this with hundreds of tons force - btw, that's one reason no watch movement assembling is done in the same building, usually - the strokes of these presses
are like small earth quakes..... ruining even the most steady hands of the watchmaker.

Here's a picture f such a stamping  process, taken in the PP case manufatcure facility (during ThePuristS factory visit in 2003):

This picture shows the several (typical) steps of the stamping process with later following steps of milling, turning and drilling to follow....

The stamping is not only to cut out the desired portions, later drop forging or molding with even more force gives the desired curvatures as well.
The nice side effect is, that the precious metalls will be work hardened at the same time - without loosing too much of  weight in form of tiny shavings,
which  generally means more loss of precious metall when re processed.

 Coming back to your original question - if one lug of your watch would be damaged -. in such a way which would mean it's basicaly impossible to refinish
in a more or less classical way, let's say even some laser welding and adding material wouldn't help...- of course it would be possible to "add" a lug to the case
and even to do it in a way it's almost invisible.  That's one of the great pro's of precious metall in generall - given one is skilled and knows about the base alloy, etc.
I'm pretty sure this is an option one would think about in perhaps 30 or 40 years, perhaps when no more spare cases/parts are availlable.
If it would happen today - I'd guess PP would more likely replace a case band in case of such a heavy damage.

Curious - is your question purely hypothetic or is there a real problem??

Best regards

Suitbert