They say we are in a double-dip recession at the moment - all I can say is that it seems not to be affecting my work-load which is steadily rising. I am now quoting a 7-month turn-round....
This seems also to be the case with other colleagues I talk to who say that, while sales for 'run-of-the-mill' clocks are still depressed (or stagnant at best, though sales of top quality ones seem to be holding up well), repair work is pouring in.
In my case the increase in turn-round time is (I admit) partly due to a bereavement in the family, and the work involved in clearing the flat and being an executor of the will - and spending about a full day tidying up while trying to find my driving licence and the copy I had just had certified to send to the solicitor, which eventually turned up when I pulled out last months Horological Journal! -  but even without this I would be getting more than I can get through. It does mean that I can be more selective in the work I take on of course..
Interesting work that I have recently taken on includes a movement with a twin-roller, single-wheel variant of the Gautier dead-beat escapement, a Russian marine chronometer with 'a broken escapement' (this I have not yet seen but have said I will certainly look at and assess), an elaborate Fitzroy barometer for a major restoration, another marine chronometer, and an Atmos clock (I love these - the action is so delicate...).
Some recent highlights have included a bracket clock with most of the time train on a platform on the bottom of the back plate - controlled by a Massey type 3 lever escapement (for which I had to make a replacement lever!), an R.E.D. traveling timepiece clock with a 2-plane lever escapement (as in Allix & Bonnert's 'Carriage Clocks' page 213/4) and one of the old 8-day swinging 'Elephant' mystery clocks - I am a sucker for unusual escapements!
Ah well - back to the bench!

Solar Power

Well, this HAS been a bit of a saga....

It all started at least 6 months ago when I first looked into getting solar power for the workshop. I could only fund part of it myself from capital in hand, so I had to raise the rest. First I tried to get my OH to contribute (on the basis that it is a jointly-owned property and this would increase the value) but she was not prepared to, nor were other family members, as they did not trust the government guarantee of 43.3p/kW generated index linked for the next 25 years, so it was a job for a commercial loan.
Before I was prepared to agree to paying out for one I had to get listed building consent and also, because the roof of the garage (onto which the array was to be fitted) had to be strengthened to cope, planning permission & Building Control consent.....
By the time I had got that lot sorted, and the loan offer in place, the government had brought forward the deadline for reduction in the Feed-in-Tariff which would make it far less profitable (or indeed totally unprofitable), but I though I could squeeze in before the deadline, and agreed to the loan.
I then found that the company which had promised they could fit the panels for me in time and for an agreed price had run out of the panels we had agreed on and could only supply far more expensive ones - so I told them where to get off!
I rang a few other people and was told they were all booked up - no surprise there - but one of them said that they were now able to get panels far more cheaply and to ring back once the rush was over to get a revised quote.
I decided that, since I had the loan anyway I might as well proceed, so in due course I did contact them, and also a couple of others for revised quotes.
One of them turned out to be substantially cheaper than the rest, and the government had been forced to back-track on the rate reduction, so I agreed to have a 4kW array set up by them.
The return to the full rate of FiT was only for a short period though, so I had to get moving...
I phoned the builders to check they could do the work in the time allowed, and agreed a date with them, then the solar panel company to tell them when the roof would be ready, and ask for confirmation that they would be able to fit the panels in the remaining window of time before the deadline, which they agreed would be fine.
I confirmed with the builders, who did their job. I then contacted the solar panel company again because I had not yet been given a date for the fitting, and was told they had not yet set a date because they were waiting for confirmation that the roof work was completed and would now be strong enough! They seemed incapable of telling me exactly what details they needed from me to confirm that the roof was now OK, but after several phone calls, emails, faxes etc they finally accepted that it was, and agreed to come and fit the system on the 24th Feb, well in time for the deadline of the 3rd March. Much relief on my part...
They duly arrived, started work...... and discovered they had been supplied with the wrong selection of fasteners to attach the panels to the roof rails...  - thank God there was a week in hand! They agreed to return on the following Thursday.  Beginning to get rather short finger-nails by now....
I waited in all day and made several phone calls to find out what was happening, but they never showed up, and eventually (at ~ 6.30!) the manager rang me to ask if they had turned up... I pointed out that I had rung them twice to find out where the fitters were, and had been promised a return call which had not materialised. He said something about "other teams telling him that one of them had jacked off". No real apology, but a promise to turn up the following day. Down to the wire now.....
They did indeed turn up the next day (Friday - the last chance to get connected before the deadline for the return to the lower FiT rate) and finished fitting the system.................... only to find the inverter was not working. **##!!**~~!!**@@##!!*. I did however have the certificate to say I was connected so I could register the system in time for the full rate.
Finally they returned this morning to sort out the problem - and found that the only problem was that the imbecile who had been here on Friday had connected the positive and negative leads to the inverter the wrong way round!!!!!!
What a waste of everyone's time...
All's well that ends well though, and the upshot is that I do now (finally!) have a 4kW solar PV installation up and running and earning me the full 43.3p/generated unit from the government, guaranteed for 25 years and index linked, as well as (currently) 3.1p/unit exported to the grid to be paid by the electricity company. Since the meter does not show how much is exported, and how much is used here, the assumption is that 50% is exported, so I should be nicely in funds once the loan is paid off!

Training

This is a major problem in this trade as there are too few of us to warrant many places running courses.

Currently there is one in the Birmingham School of Jewellery, and one at West Dene College, and of course, the Distance Learning course and seminars run by the BHI, plus the Epping Forest Clock Club (and possibly a few others like it), but that is about it.


Going back to when I started in the trade there were also courses for disabled at St Loyes, skill centre courses (until they were privatised by Thatcher and then went bust) and a both a full time and a day-release course run at Hackney Tech (and I think a couple of others but I can't remember where) but these have now all gone - so when people want to learn the trade they can find it a bit hard to get any 'hands-on experience.....

We have all bemoaned this situation and occasionally someone sets up a course for a few students (as I think was done by Laurie Pennman?) which receive mixed reviews and may or may not survive.

There are of course businesses in the trade which take on people who are 'improvers' (i e have the basic skills but no, or very little, experience) but not many, so far as I know, will take on people who are complete novices just starting to learn the basics.


I have now, as it were, 'put my money where my mouth is' and taken on an 'apprentice' for most of one day a week - I can't give him any more than that as there is not room for two people at the bench at once, so he can only be here for as long as I have admin to do. He is traveling for a couple of hours each way to get here, and refusing any payment as he reckons the knowledge gained is payment enough! I have to say that any payment I could offer would be very small at the moment as his through-put of work is not yet significant enough to warrant more, so I am happy to accept his refusal of any pay. In fact, at the moment I think he is cost-neutral, since the admin is interrupted every so often by requests for information about something or for me to check if a bit of work is up to standard yet, but that will hopefully change as he gets the experience he came for. When it does we can revisit this subject...

Is this something that others could also consider?

a disappointment... and a good day

Another example of life's vicissitudes...

The other day I received notification from SpecialistAuctions.com that someone had bought a clock 

and a barometer

 from me. I got all excited - £900 of sale is a nice bonus....

Sadly, after much to-ing and fro-ing of emails it seems that the 'buyer' was a con-man, so there will be no PayPal credit to transfer. :-(  Luckily I had not given him any account information or dispatched the goods so I am not out of pocket, only disappointed! Now I just have to get the final Valuation Fees refunded and the items back up for sale.


On the other hand, I did have a good day at the Antiques Fair I attend most months in Woodstock (it runs for the Saturday and Sunday of the weekend with the second Sunday of the month), which made up to an extent for that disappointment. I have a lot of old Chinese mother-of-pearl gaming counters

 which I have been trying to sell for a while with very little luck. Over the last month I turned a few of them into earrings and necklaces and all of a sudden I sold £60-worth of the counters to people who liked the idea and wanted to copy it. (I would have liked to sell the 'value-added' items, but no matter - I still have them as examples for next month!)
Then there were the customers bringing me repair jobs and/or collecting items I had repaired. I guess it is a case of swings and roundabouts - as with so many things in this life.
As a bonus I now have someone else who is very interested in the clock which I thought I had sold, so maybe I will have some of that cash in due course after all! (cue Life of Brian's 'Always look on the bright side of life'...)

What a week!

Never mind days, this has been one of those weeks when I should not have got out of bed!
Over the last week I have definitely moved backwards.
A carriage clock which I thought was repaired and just in need of regulating (by addition of some timing washers) needs a new balance staff, an Atmos clock in which I had fitted a new suspension needs it taking out and another one fitted because it was wrongly manufactured, and my car has broken down, so a trip to London customers on Tuesday, which started at 5 am, and should have ended about 5 pm, finally ended (courtesy of the RAC) at 7.30pm. I did not get to the last of the customers on the list and the one before wasn't at home and had made no attempt to contact me.
A trip to the garage (Monday) to get a new sender for the car alarm resulted in a one-hour wait while they discovered they had the wrong one and that the right one is unavailable. They then said that another garage ~ 10 miles away from them had some second hand ones, but when I got there the boss was out. I arranged to return that afternoon but when I did he told me he needed far more time than the employee had thought and he was not able to do it before closing.
Because of the car breaking down, I did not get to a blood donating session, I did not get to an evening meeting and I am not gong to be able to get to the antiques fair in Woodstock where I should have a stall tomorrow! I was supposed to be having today off with GoodInParts, but that has gone down the pan as well.....
We (my friendly mechanic & I) <i>think</i> we have found the problem - a crank-shaft sensor - but it needs replacing and we won't be able to get the part till Monday and since GoodInParts probably can't get me back here on Sunday evening or Monday morning it looks like I will be suck here for the weekend.

All I can say is Thank God you only get this sort of week very occasionally!

First blog...

As the title says, this is my first attempt at a blog, so if it goes horribly wrong please bear with me... Hopefully it will improve with experience!

I think I had better start with a bit of an information about what I do.

Most of my work is repair and/or restoration of customers' clocks, but I also have a selection of clocks some of which I have now restored and are for sale. I also work on mercury and anaeroid barometers, barographs, music boxes (and even the occasional clockwork toy… :-) )

I am not a specialist in any particular type of clock, but mainly restrict myself to jobs ranging from miniature carriage clocks to longcase (or ‘grandfather’) clocks. In terms of quality, I will work on everything from your Grandad’s Westminster chime to a marine Chronometer (but the Westminster chime would probably need to have a lot of ‘sentimental’ value for you to be prepared to pay the cost!). – For example, I have currently have on test an Atmos clock, a longcase clock, a Westminster chime and 3 striking mantel clocks, a repeat strike/alarm carriage clock, a dial clock, and 2 Vienna Regulators, with another carriage clock and a mantel clock currently under repair – and a load waiting!

Actually, on the subject of Atmos clocks, there is a bit of a problem. They are made by Jaeger LeCoultre, who, like most of the Swiss horology houses, operate a ‘no parts sales’ practice. This, I believe, is an illegal restrictive practice. The European General Court has recently ruled that this is indeed the case... but no doubt there will be an appeal, and the situation will drag on for another decade or two before anything actually changes.

Luckily it does not affect me very much as most of the output of these companies is watches which I don’t handle, but it does affect me on the rare occasions when I need parts for clocks such as the Atmos. The only way round the ban is to fit parts that are copies of the originals, which can be obtained from some paces in the US. I don’t like having to do this as they are, inevitably, not exact copies, which means that the performance may be slightly affected. I can’t see how this is in the interest of J le C.

It is also not in their interest as it means that there will be far fewer watchmakers capable of working on good quality mechanical movements for them to chose from to employ in their own workshops!

A strange coincidence happened last week. I went to the AGM of the Cheltenham branch of the British Horological Institute, and there was a new member there, who had recently joined the branch. What is odd in that you ask? Nothing, except that he was someone I knew and had considered starting a joint venture with when I was in South London, but who had completely vanished off the face of the horological world for about 20 years! I was very pleased to catch up with him…

Speaking of BHI branches, if you are interested in horology, please do come to the branch meetings. You don’t need to be a member of the Institute, let alone a professional horologist. They have some very interesting talks on an assortment of subjects, mainly linked to the trade but not exclusively so, and a good natter before & after. Most branches meet on a monthly basis, though many will have a break in the summer and/or  winter months. You can get details of your nearest branch and when it meets from the Institute headquarters.