| Time in their hands By Hal Brown Bucky Taylor and J.C. Woodward have their hands on a lot of time. As often as not their hands will be delving into antique clock mechanisms because their East Norwalk business, The Clockery, keeps them busy enough that they have very little time on their hands. Timepieces, they have. Conversation in the store at 14 Van Zant St. is punctuated with occasional bells, bongs and cuckoos. It's not as cacaphonous is as you'd expect at noon, though. "The only ones that are running are the ones we've recently finished and are testing," woodward said. "The clock we look at is the electric one on the wall." There are no other electrics around, though. "We don't do watches, we don't do electrics," Taylor said. "We do modern clocks, most of the time we end up replacing the movements on the newer onces, if they're still available." The bulk of the business is restoring antique clocks, which is an exacting process. "The one thing all antiques have in common is you can't order parts, if you need something you make it," Woodward said. Clock restorers have to be part historian as well. "We spend a lot of our time emulation the different tools and techniques of the different periods in the different countries. A part from a 19th century French clock is going to look quite different from a 17th century British clock. You have to be able to work in all those different styles because the ethic of restoration is that your work should be indistinguishable from the original. You don't go substituting modern materials, even though they might work better. The idea is to restore it the way it was originally built. That's very satisfying and quite challenging as well." The process mimics the former clockmaking process as well. Taylor and Woodward don't do all the work themselves. "We rely on a whole army of allied craftsmen, which is the way it was done a hundred years ago" Woodward said. "The clockmaker didn't actually make the case and paint the dial and cut the hands and fit the gears. He was kind of like the maitre d' that serves the meal." Taylor, a mechanical engineer, is a fugitive from a corporate research and development job for General Time, which at that time owned Seth Thomas and Westclox, "I was a mechanical designer, designing gear trains, atomic clocks, a number of associated products," Taylor said. "A friend had a Seth Thomas clock, and he said 'Oh, you work for Seth Thomas. I have an antique clock, would you be interested in trying to fix it? I did and it seemed like very nice work. It's the kind of work, small intricate mechanical parts, which I love to do." Taylor removed himself as a cog in the R & D lab machinery, and started up the business. "I worked out of my house for probably two years, then I put an ad in the local paper and got so much work I didn't know what to do," he said. "It proved to be a needed niche." The Clockery started up in 1972 in Old McDonalds Farm, a former amusement park/restaurant on the Post Road near the Darien line. He labored by himself until Woodward, also a corporate refugee, joined the business in 1985. "I was doing software, and I very much enjoyed that, but at the end of each project there was nothing really tangible to show for all the effort," Woodward said. "When you're restoring an antique clock you have an artifact that may be one or two centuries old. You can present it back to the owner as a working mechanism. The customers are impressed and they're pleased, it's very satisfying in that regard." Woodward said the business, even if it's not as lucrative as corporate jobs, allows "a much nicer lifestyle for both of us." |
 |
 |
| Back |
|
 |
| Directory |
| Next |