In praise of all those little watches that could!

Before I started collecting almost only PW's and mainly South Bends, I was the Wrist Watch guy! I remember first discovering the local Knock chapter and they asked me if I was a PW or a WW type of guy. When I said WW there was some enthusiastic clapping but mostly a lot of good-natured booing. Most of the guys were PW and clock guys and hardly any WW guys. I started collecting WW's, mainly military (since I wuz' wearing 'em, in the military) and Pilot Watches and Chronographs in the 1980's and had only recently heard of this organization that was supposed to promote and support timepiece collection.

It was 1998 and I was wearing the Breitling Navitimer I'd just bought... and although many people politely asked what WW I was wearing, none of them knew a Breitling from a Chase-Durer. In short, at that first Knock meeting, I was there with over 40 people didn't collect anything that I collected. I had modern watches from the early 80's to the late 90's, and two really nice ones that I'd saved for; one was the Navitimer and the other was even more expensive but not much of a watch, more of a status symbol.

There was one guy there I remember named Bill Tapp. He had a few of the Waltham(?) 1883's with him along with a beautiful poster of 1883's, like 30 of them? All different damaskeening patterns. Really an amazing poster. It was really pretty but I still loved my Navitimer. The oldest guy there, name of Roger Dankert, asked me what I wanted to do as far as collecting. Well, somehow the topic of WW repair entered the conversation and now my purpose was not to collect but to clean! Roger called someone else over who gave me a bunch of old WW's, rusty tweezers and a mishmash of little screwdrivers. Oh, an they gave me a book, but they made me pay for that, called "The Watch Repairer's Manual".

During the next month I picked the obviously destroyed or hopeless WW's (WW triage) and practiced with them. There were all kinds of different little pieces and parts and I kept losing them because the tweezer's were obviously broken somehow. And I was reading parts of the book and becoming pretty good at being able to tell which direction a part had flown off in when the tweezer's dispalyed the mystery defect they had.

First thing at the next meeting Roger cornered me and asked how I was doing. I told him it was frustrating but fun. It was like taking apart the radio or the TV when I was a kid, but this time I didn't get in trouble. He pulled a little cheap watch out of his pocket and told me "This needs cleaning but it's a good ticker. See if you can get it going." It was like one the watches my grandfather wore. Barely 30mm across. A handwind, hadn't they already invented automatics? And it was no name brand. Roger had a few of the guys give me their phone number so I could call them if I had problems.

And I did it! That first time you put the balance back in and your' afraid you've broken it somehow and it won't work... and then it's like magic, it starts ticking! It was just as good as jumping out of a plane, and a lot safer. I guess it's never quite like that again. Now I've fixed so many it's second nature to get them merely running, challenging just to have it run very well,indeed, almost perfect..

I found that first watch, a little Vantage 17j with a Standard Time 92 mvmt, last weekend. Since i first played with it I've found that there were a lot of cheap watches, the ones just above the Timex, that used exactly that movement or something almost identical like the FHF 96. The watches are good, I supposed that's why they kept using them. The only thing I can remember I didn't like was the click spring which I spent a good deal of time looking for. I probably couldn't get even a 1/20th of what the movement is worth on Ebay, and I ain't chuckin'it, so I guess It's mine now, forever.

And good old Roger. He died a few years ago, he was just shy of 100. I was told he didn't even like WW's, he was a clock collector and repairman. About a decade before the died he decided he didn't like clocks anymore. He had so many in his house that he could have been on that show "hoarders". He had a few sales and auctions and then even gave stuff away until he whittled his collection down to the ones he really liked, the "keepers". I wonder if somewhere there he had the first clock that he repaired.

Posts: 1029 | Location: Denver, Colorado U.S.A. | Registered: October 08, 2004

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