Watch repairmen becoming scarce

HELENA – Hovering with his head hunched inches over the opened back of a gold railroad watch, Marvin Hunt picks a pallet fork off the glass-plated table top with his tweezers and begins maneuvering the piece into position.

Just a few millimeters in length and weighing so little it might hitch a ride in someone’s hair without them ever feeling it, the hammer-shaped piece is nearly microscopic but has one of the biggest roles in the timepiece’s function.

Hold up any analog watch to your ear and listen for a tick as each second passes by. That’s the pallet fork at work.

With this particular one, Hunt struggles to fit it between the numerous pieces on the back. As he drops it in he reveals his secret to holding a steady hand, even as he approaches 55 years of age.

“I hold my breath,” he says sheepishly, conceding that it isn’t a good habit in the trade.

Precision movements are a must in the disappearing trade of horology, the art of making and repairing watches. A timepiece the size of a silver dollar will have roughly 50 or 60 moving parts squeezed into the space. Battery-powered ones will have many fewer.

Hunt, the owner of Barnes Jewelry in downtown Helena, says he was encouraged by his mother to join the trade.

“I liked to mess around with my hands, but I didn’t like to get my hands too dirty,” he says.

That pretty much eliminates becoming a car mechanic.

Still, Hunt finds himself dipping steel pins into a dime-size bowl of oil to grease the wheels of the pocket watch, keeping an incredible piece of machinery roughly his same age in working condition. Few vehicles would ever live so long.

Each watch he works on presents its own challenges. Sometimes fixing its timing – a classic railroad watch is required to be within two seconds, plus or minus, of universal time – involves a quick cleaning and a few adjustments.

Other times, he has to make his own parts or finds himself replacing the improvised ones that were inserted by former horologists, many of whom didn’t have the resources to find the exact piece they needed in the past.

“In those days, you used what you had,” he says, pulling out his own drawer of minuscule spare parts he might need in a pinch.

Today’s horologists have more advanced tools and techniques than their counterparts generations ago. The electronic computer system in his workshop just beyond the glass cases of the store is a testament to that.

He can place the watch in an arm and test it in all six running positions – face up, face down, on one side, then the other and so on – to make sure it’s within specifications.

Even with the advancements, horology is an endangered trade, one that is barely sustaining itself.

Cheap plastic and the digital era have made the profession unnecessary to the average wearer. A $20 wristwatch isn’t worth repairing for three to six times the price, unless it holds sentimental value.

However, horologists are still in heavy demand since gold pocket watches are often handed down as family heirlooms, or jewel-encrusted wristwatches with hefty price tags are too valuable to simply be chucked in the trash.

It isn’t the timepieces that people have lost interest in. It’s the profession itself.

“I’m kind of the last of the young ones,” says Hunt, who enrolled at Gem City College in Quincy, Ill., right out of high school. “Many now do it simply as a hobby, something to do in retirement.”

Russell Hagenah, president of Gem City, agrees.

“It’s relatively an unknown profession,” he says. “You walk into the jewelry store, you automatically expect someone to help you.”

That’s rarely the case. Many seeking horologists have to send their item out of town with another piece of technology – the Internet – helping them out.

Helena is a bit lucky to have two watch repairmen. Dave Barnes – whose uncle, Bob, sold Hunt his store with the family name still on it – works for Saunders Jewelry.

Dave Barnes concentrates solely on the small timepieces, leaving clock repair to Hunt and a handful of other repairmen around town.

Barnes learned his trade from a school in Great Falls, graduating in 1978. He says there was another one he knew of in Kalispell. Both have since closed.

“Myself, I went into a jewelry store in Butte and was watching a person who was doing watch repair; I asked him about it,” Barnes says. “I always liked working with small things.”

Both Hunt and Barnes entered the profession after the boom following World War II. Hunt says many of the repairmen were former Army soldiers who had suffered injuries and had little more than infantry training. Mechanical watches were more common and schools were open all across the country.

After quartz – or digital – watches began taking over the market in the ’70s, many just assumed the profession would pass along with the trend. Schools closed and the age of horologists began to steadily climb.

But, even as cellphones hurt the watch industry, the demand for clock and watch repairmen remains.

Barnes tries not to allow a watch to stay in his store for more than a few weeks. If he doesn’t have the parts, it could take longer.

Those who repair clocks, Hunt included, could take months or even years to have a piece repaired.

“All clock repairmen are way behind, a year or two,” Barnes says. A friend in Great Falls told him he has a three-year waiting list on his clocks.

In an economic recession where people are waiting to find work, horology is certainly a viable option.

“I tell people, ‘If your son’s mechanically inclined, have him go to clock school,’ ” Barnes says. “You just have to have a whole lot of patience and dexterity. And be somewhat mechanically inclined.”

Hagenah says his school is often able to find jobs for graduates and one piece of school literature estimates the starting salary at $30,000 per year.

Other schools have popped up recently, with the NAWCC (National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors Inc.) School of Horology in Columbia, Pa., having started in 1995.

A 2005 article by Bloomberg News revealed how companies like Rolex and Swatch were donating millions of dollars to existing schools and colleges like Oklahoma State to keep the numbers of those repairmen who are certified with their watches around.

Only 12 certified schools existed at the time and the number of repairmen had dwindled to 7,000. At least 4,000 would be needed to fulfill the numbers of those expected to retire soon.

Those who do learn the trade will not only be keeping a profession but history alive.

It’s why Hunt smiles when he sees an older watch that can tell the story of a family.

“I really enjoy doing heirloom watches because they’re something that will be passed down,” he says. “It preserves the history.”