Around the corner from me is an antique clock repair shop. It contains, as one would expect, a panoply of tiks and toks, piles of gears, a well-stroked shop cat who is far too clever to get his tail caught in any of the exposed mechanisms, and a greying gentleman with glasses who works at a desk covered in brass clutter. Behind the desk stands a set of clock hands–the spare set from Stanford’s clock tower. The minute hand is about seven feet tall.
I’ve been there before, just trainspotting with the owner and the other fine gentlemen of the neighborhood who stop by to discuss the important matters of the day, month, and previous decades. Old agreements and disagreements with well-worn edges are brought up, polished once or twice, and put away, against the constant backdrop of soft clicks and swinging pendulums.
Today I stopped by to ask the owner about my new watch – an 18-ruby all-mechanical Raketa from the former Soviet union. It had finally settled down to a consistent speed – I’d been wearing it to let the lubrication distribute – and I wanted to ask him about getting it adjusted.
I wasn’t expecting much. No one shops the CCCP looking for fine mechanical equipment. But I hoped I could get it to reasonably accurate. It was, after all, a consistent 2 1/2 minutes fast.
“Five . . . that used to be the standard,” he said, pulling the watch away from his ear. I waited. “Modern movements use six beats to the second. Made in an old factory, then, if it’s new. . . elliptical gear has some oil frozen on it, that’ll have to be cleaned, if it can be. Hear it?” I could, once he had pointed it out; what I had taken to be a regular tik-tik-tik-tik-tik was clearly now periodically louder; tik-tik-TIK-tik-tik.
He told me several other details about how the watch was working, without touching it again, and gave me the name of someone who would fix it all.
I left happy, even though I now had a not-small price tag for making my watch run correctly. The presence of skilled artisans in San Francisco is always reassuring to me, somehow.
