Some 68 years ago, a young Hess Nyenhuis set off on his path to become a time lord.
Nyenhuis, 82, says he grew up in Holland next to a watchmaker's shop. The man's work fascinated him, and he'd often watch through the shop windows as the watchmaker laboured away at the intricate mechanisms of those amazing machines.
One day, the man asked him if he wanted to be a watchmaker. He said yes, so the man sat him down in front of an old alarm clock.
"You take it apart, clean it all up and put it back together," the man said.
Nyenhuis says he immediately set to work. Unfortunately, he didn't know to release the tension from the clock's spring first.
"So when I took everything apart, zoom! There were wheels all over the workshop!
"He said, 'That's Lesson 1,'" he recalls, laughing.
Long-time St. Albert residents, Nyenhuis and his wife Ronnie run the Golden Hour Clock Shop in west Edmonton. Nyenhuis is one of the few people in the Edmonton region who specializes in antique clock repair.
"I like to work on detailed work," he explains, and he enjoys the craftsmanship that you can only find in antique clocks.
The shop itself contains hundreds of clocks — wood ones, metal ones, car and cat-shaped ones, all ticking away, filling the crowded Edmonton shop with bings, bongs, and the chimes of Westminster every hour.
"Never a dull moment in this place," Nyenhuis says.
Timekeepers
Mark Stricklin's clock repair shop is coincidentally just a few blocks away from Nyenhuis's. Known as The Clock Doctor, he answers the door of his home-based business decked out in white lab-coat and shorts.
"It's part of the shtick," he explains. The shorts are seasonal, he adds.
Inside, a treated patient – a dollop-shaped dark brown mantel clock – happily ticks away alongside other broken models awaiting repair. It and about a half-dozen other clocks sound a cacophony of chimes every hour.
Stricklin says he's been fixing mechanical clocks professionally since 2001, having become fascinated with them as a child seeing them in his grandparents' homes.
Dismantling his first clock at age 10 (permanently, since he had no idea what he was doing), Stricklin started hanging out with clock shop owners and fixing clocks as a hobby. He got his certificate in clock repair from the now-defunct National School of Horology in Quebec and now repairs about a hundred clocks a year, including many from St. Albert.
"You run across so many different clocks," he says, ranging from Swiss hand-painted ceramic ones with solid gold trim to cheap Walmart specials.
"This lady brought a guitar into me (once) and said, 'Can you make a clock out of it for me?" So he did. He's also seen clocks that feature fishermen, naked ladies and a singing hobo.
Nyenhuis says he spent four years of intense study at one of Switzerland's many clock schools, learning to lathe and file parts by hand.
Now, he spends his days fixing clocks and watches of all kinds in a crowded workshop, his tables littered with gears and assemblies. Tiny drawers containing every gear, bushing and pinion imaginable line the walls.
"You need a spare wheel for your transmission? I got some here!" he jokes, holding a drawer of cogs fit for a mouse-sized Honda Civic.
Time machines
Charlie Calarco of Edmonton's Old Woodworks furniture restoration store says he picked up clock repair as a hobby decades ago after noticing all the busted clocks in the old clock cases he'd been asked to fix. He's since become a bit of a history buff when it comes to horology (the art of clock-making).
Household mechanical clocks got their start in the 1700s through the industrial revolution, Calarco says. Most were extremely elaborate and durable, affordable only by the super-rich.
"The clocks made 200 years ago, they were designed to last forever," he says.
He's worked on ones built in the 1710s and had one from 1815 ticking away by his desk. Many are works of art unto themselves, and are passed on as family heirlooms.
Calarco says most early clocks were weight-driven, and used the pull of a large mass to drive their mechanisms. Advances in metallurgy in the 1700s made spring-powered clocks possible.
Every clock or watch breaks down into about four parts, reports Horologyzone.com: a main gear, a gear train, a balance wheel, and an escapement.
The main gear transmits power to gear train, which control the hands of the clock. The escapement is a catch that forces the gear train to advance just one tooth at a time instead of all at once, and creates the tick of the clock. The spring-loaded balance wheel spins back and forth at set intervals, releasing the escapement's catch as it does so, to control the clock's movements.
You can make scores of different clocks from this basic engine. Anniversary clocks use flywheels to store enough energy to run all year on a single winding, for example. Cuckoo clocks will have complex gear trains to set birds dancing and bellows to produce the cuckoo sound.
Nyenhuis has clocks with wooden gears, clocks with bells and music boxes, and clocks powered by atmospheric pressure in his shop. Many are more than a century old.
His personal favourite is the Golden Hour clock — a model with a clear face whose hands seem to float in mid-air. A motor turns the clock face to indirectly move the hands, which stay pointed in the right directions using gears and counterweights, he explains.
Fixing time
Clocks are often a part of people's families for generations, Stricklin says. Much like a cherished relative, you need someone to take care of them.
Diagnosing a sick clock is a matter of physics and math, Stricklin says. Power flows through the clock in set paths, and it's a matter of cracking open the clock and looking at how it ticks (or doesn't) to find the problem.
The culprit is almost always dirt and poor lubrication, Calarco, Stricklin and Nyenhuis say.
"The biggest enemy of mechanical movements in clocks is dryness and dust," Calarco says.
Clocks should be oiled at least every five years and cleaned every 15, Calarco says. If you don't, you get sticky, abrasive gunk that grinds gears and jams up the clock.
Cleaning the clock fixes it about 95 per cent of the time, Stricklin says. That means taking it apart and using a toothbrush and cleaning solution to remove the gunk. Nyenhuis says he uses an ultrasonic bath instead to avoid discolouration of the brass.
You can also get misalignments caused by shafts wearing through soft structural plates. Nyenhuis says he uses bronze bushings to realign these shafts, as bronze lasts longer than brass.
You can also get worn or broken parts. While you can buy many replacements, sometimes you have to make your own using files and a lathe.
This is extremely precise work that can take months, Nyenhuis says.
"If I make one mistake, the clock will jam up."
Some mechanisms are too worn or cheap to repair, and must be replaced with modern quartz movements.
"That's very sad for me," Stricklin says. "It takes away the essence of the clock."
The end of time?
While mechanical clocks can last for centuries, the clock repair industry might not be so long lived. Nyenhuis notes that Canada's last clock school closed a few years ago. He tried to start a clock repair course through NAIT once, but the province wasn't interested in supporting it.
Still, Stricklin says there are plenty of old clocks left to fix, and a niche market that needs to be filled.
Nyenhuis says he plans to keep doing it for another decade at least.
"Why stop?" he asks.
"I like what I'm doing. I take my time."
