Dinner with David Walter: Australian Clockmaker in California

On December 12th, 2002, a very lucky group of PuristS got together to enjoy some delicious food and fine wines at Cafe Blanc in Los Angeles. After dinner, we were treated to a short talk by David Walter on what it means to be a clockmaker in todays world and how he came to enjoy this distinction.

[Working as a watchmaker,] I became a bit disillusioned with the same kind of half dozen, ten watches time and time again. I needed to do something a little creative so I went back into antique restoration. Then I subsequently from that - an argument with an antique dealer I worked for in Vienna, virtually rebuilt a Patek Philippe chronograph. He made a comment about, "You only repaired it, you didn't make it, why is your bill so high?" I said, "I damn near did remake it." We had a pretty heated argument about it and I said, "Well the hell with it, I'm going home to make my own watch and I'll put my name on it," and he said, "And I'll buy it!"

I went home to start making the watch and - I didn't because I ran out of tools so I never got as far as finishing the watch so he never bought it. But in the time of looking for tools, a customer who I restored pocket watches for came in with the first real clock I had ever seen. I mean real clock as opposed to a Herschede, or an Urgos, or a Westclox Big Ben or any of those numerous other non-descript, mass-market things. It was a Viennese skeleton clock with a very large remontoire. It was the first real, interesting clock I had seen and I thought, "That looks really good." So I thought, "While I'm looking for these [tools] I'll start making a clock," and so I did.

Now I made four clocks when I was still in Vienna and then afterwards when I went back to Australia I started making - got more serious into making clocks. Perth, western Australia, where I come from, is the most isolated city in the world. For us, Jakarta is closer than Sydney. West is actually - Perth is lower than South Africa, so the next stop is actually South America. South is the South Pole and it's two and a half days drive to the next city within the same country.

So I was the only person who had the faintest idea what I was talking about. There was nobody to talk to. The internet hadn't been invented and phone calls were expensive, about $3 a minute in those days sort of thing, and libraries were virtually non-existent for clocks. So in many ways, I started making clocks and I couldn't find what I was looking for so I reinvented the wheel.

This clock is one I've just finished in the last four weeks. And this, for those who haven't heard, is year going. There's probably in the world a couple hundred year-going clocks and that's it, because they are so difficult to make. Having just made two, I can testify, I'm not making another one.

But, it does go and even being moved around in the back of a van and brought down here and on a table that's not that great, and despite it's half degree pendulum swing, it's been going all night so I'm pretty happy with that. This one is actually staying in Pasadena. The second one is going off to Hong Kong.

This one over here, this clock that Bill Taylor owns and brought in tonight, I made this in, I think about '85 or '86, I'm not exactly sure anymore. This was the second stage of this clock. This is a double great wheel with the two wheels behind each other.

Normally the wheels are alongside each other for ease of winding. Putting them behind each other increases the difficulties enormously. [I'm] always looking for something a little bit different to do in every clock I've done. Except for the first 6 or 8 clocks that were fairly uninspired, but I was kind of going on things I had seen in the past in museums or collections of photographs.

After that, I started to develop what you might call your own style, and a great deal of that I believe was because I was in such isolation. I know you're all watch people, I understand that, but the Swiss have blinkers [blinders]. They have tunnel vision.

I remember once in Switzerland I wanted some mainsprings for this clock. I went in with another clock that had the same mainspring and I said, "I want these springs."

And they said, "OK, we can make them, how many do you need?"

And I thought, I'll get brave, "I'll take a hundred."

They said, "Our minimum order is 5,000," and they gave me a price that was, I dunno, it was only maybe eight or nine hundred dollars which was quite reasonable and I thought "OK, for 100 springs that's a good deal."

So I said, "I'll tell you what, charge me for 5,000 and I'll take 800."

He said, "We can't do that."

I said, "Why?"

"Because our minium order is 5,000."

So we got into this conversation about it and eventually, I said, "OK, I'll take the 800, you make 5,000 and I'll sell the rest somehow or throw them away, I don't care."

He said, "No, we can't."

I said, "Why?"

He said, "Well, you can't do it."

And I said, "But I have done it, here's a photograph." And I had the clock with me, I pulled the clock out and put it on the table and said, "There's the clock."

He said, "Yes, you did it once, but you might not be able to do it again."

By this time, I was kinda run out of steam, so I asked him, "What's happening?"

"Well, you can't make the clock."

Ok, I had a little problem with that, "Why?"

He said, "Well, you're not an engineer, you're not a designer, you're not a mathematician, you haven't been to a college, you don't have a degree and most of all, you're not Swiss."

In some ways they saved me from all that and allowed me to develop things that are quite different. I believe that anybody who makes anything, their own style will develop. I've said it to a couple of people tonight, "Anyone who's ever seen one of my clocks, without the signature or with the signature, will recognize it in an second," because there's a certain style that's a little bit like your handwriting. It's your signature. It comes whether you really want it to or not and how acceptable it is is another mattter.
Everything I do is slightly different. The first one of these didn't have this differential winding in the base. I wanted to make something different and I wanted to avoid the possibility of every week having to take the dome off, hence breaking it. Then this was the second version of it, and I made five of these, and that's all there was ever intended to be.

And then in the last year we developed this, which is probably version three, of the same style, not the same clock, because this is a striking train and this a timepiece, which I prefer. I'm not too keen on the noisemaking and the music and the bells and things like that. I prefer a highly accurate regulator to something making Westminster sounds.

I was surprised, I haven't seen this for probably six or eight years and I thought they were the same size and we can see that they're quite obviously not.

There's a number of interesting features that both of these have. As watch people, you might not grasp it but, normally to have a clock that ticks seconds you need a seconds pendulum which is a meter long, thirty-nine and a half inches. The way around it is to use an escape wheel with sixty teeth and a half seconds pendulum.

Again, I have seen one antique clock that does this but I know of several others that are around. It's in the books, but like many things that are in the books, they're the museum rarities, they're not the reality.

It's most unusual feature otherwise is the split dial on it. The moon, I used real mother of pearl in it. The base is lapis lazuli which I was told came from Afghanistan, but I don't actually think - I'm not sure that this is - because this is a really big slab and not much lapis has come out of Afghanistan in the last five years. And of course the other thing is it's year-going feature which became a really difficult part to do.

Now, the mainspring in this, in the barrel, actually it has two mainsprings. One mainspring is very large and it wasn't gonna do - I wasn't happy with it so I put two springs in it. The spring in there is an inch wide and twenty-eight thou [0.028 inches] thick and 230 inches long. So there's nearly twenty feet of spring - there's actually nearly forty feet in there [including both springs], of spring wrapped in there to make it go.

I also have a thing that, for clocks - everyone has seen clock keys. Most are pretty generic, most are pretty boring and unexciting, so one of the things I do, again for my signature, that's a key I make. I spend probably four hours to do that key, but at end of it I've never seen a key like this before and it's part of my signature. So if you ever see one of these keys around somewhere and it doesn't belong to one of my clocks, well, you need to know.

On this clock, this sort of key is too weak to wind it because the spring is too strong so I had to make a really big winding key, because you simply can't wind the clock, the springs are too strong. Also, I had the problem of, the barrel arbor, I didn't want it to twist.

You've all seen pieces that have been bent, even on watches, people bend winding stems. So I tried to think of a way to make a key, so I came up with this idea which slides straight over the square and can be held straight on and it just works like a ratchet. When I first went to use this, I mean I had an idea of what I wanted to make and I just kinda worked into the metal with it until I got what I wanted.

And the first time I used, I put it on and it's just smooth as silk, boy it felt really good. It worked really nice and there's two other guys that we share the shop with up in Solvang and I said, "Come over here and try this!" They sorta sheepishly tried it on and went, "Boy that's really good! That works!" So essentially, there's two of those guys [one for each year-going clock], as far as that goes, a $500 key is pretty much off the top.

Something else that I need to say is the divide between clocks and watches is always a big one. As a watchmaker, as an apprentice, which there's a six-year apprenticeship, they start you off on a - they give you a Big Ben, a Westclox or a mantle clock or some nondescript thing and say, "Pull it apart and see what happens." And of course it goes everywhere but you learn something and the first thing you try and do is learn enough about this rubbish so you can work on watches. That's what the whole deal is.

I think a lot of that has brought about the bad name clocks have, like clockmakers are failed watchmakers. Many watch people I know, who have been quite competent, have taken in clock repairs either because business went that way or they wanna keep someone happy and they've come unstuck because you need two separate tools to work on them. The tools you work on clock repairs with, you can't work on watches. You have to have two lots then.

Clockmakers are not worse than watchmakers, it's just two separate fields. It's a little bit akin to like your average auto mechanic and the guy who does heavy earth moving equipment and needs a sixteen pound sledgehammer to remove pins out of tracks on a caterpillar. He's not worse than an auto mechanic, he's just different but they're still wheeled vehicles. It's the same with clocks, they're just bigger.

Certainly in the past, Thomas Thompion, George Graham, John Harrison, Breguet, Berthoud and so on, all made clocks and watches and there was no distinction of one better than the other. We've all seen superb watches from Breguet and we've seen superb clocks that you can't compare. George Daniels has made clocks and no one berates him as being a failed watchmaker for example.

When Curtis first put my perpetual calendar up on the website, there was a question about what's this divide between - why watchmakers and clockmakers are viewed differently. I think a lot of it is that industry in the last hundred years has provided everything like Timex all the way right though to Patek Philippe and stayed there, and still there today. While clocks for the last hundred years has provided Big Bens and Big Bens and the Chinese rhythm clocks that came out in the '60's but there was no Pateks. Everything was mass production. Everything was poor quality and hence there were no top-line clocks available. I think, just over the years, that's really what's changed it.

It's made it hard for clock people. Somebody, some years ago, who was a watch related person, looked at my clocks and said, "You're not a clockmaker, you're a watchmaker." I said, "Yeah, but how did you know." He said, "Because no clockmaker would ever make it like that." "Ok, how come?" "Well, everything is far to delicate."

You can see, amongst the things here that I make everything very fine. Clock people usually make things over heavy. They think they're building Brooklyn Bridge and they're not, they can do something very light. This clock [the year-going clock] runs on less power than a marine chronometer runs on. Despite having a huge spring down here, the energy available up here is very small and it runs quite successfully.

A good regulator, a perpetual regulator, runs for a month with an eighteen pound grid-iron pendulum on it. It runs for a month on four pounds, including driving a Daniels perpetual calendar system with instant change which is quite draining on a power reserve.

I have tried, and I'm doing quite successfully over the years, of making different sort of clocks to what people have ever seen before. There are a few other people in the world, there're a couple in England, there's a Matthias Naeschke in Germany who I think does nice work, although his specialty is organ clocks which leave me stone cold. Most people - still in the clock world there's not much.

I think part of it also is that watches are so small and you see little gizmos flying around and bells and whistles and retaining and chronographs and all kinds of things happening and there's a fascination with this tininess. Sometimes that comes apart under the eyeglass. We've all seen on the website the closeup photographs of different sorts of componenets and parts and the real finish that's there.

As Curtis was saying today, even Patek Philippe's finish was better twenty years ago than it is today. Even though it's still good, it's not as good as it used to be. Corners are being cut in places. But, because of that, clocks are considered big and coarse. But I can tell you, if you don't make that clock right, it won't work.

Curtis asked me about dead beat escapements. Except for my first two clocks, which I used a recoil escapement, I developed a way to draw and design a dead beat escapement. The books that are written about it are wrong. You cannot make the escapement in the way those books are written and the same goes for the club tooth lever escapement and the other pointy tooth - the English ratchet tooth escapement. The fundamental basis of their drawing is wrong, it won't work.

It took me a long time to disciver that, I actually thought it was me. I discovered a way and I stick with it because it works. It's not maybe as exotic as some other things but a lot of other escapements are not providing what's there. It's much the same as the club tooth escapement in watches. It's stayed for years because it works. The Swiss - the English invented it - and the Swiss have improved it no end to a highly accurate, desirable escapement.

In trying to do things that are different - watches are much easier to transport than what clocks are. Those that were here earlier saw us carrying it in and you've got to set the pendulum up. Watches have to do things, they have to move in all kinds of positions, they get hot they get cold they get wet they get laid around. A clock has to sit there, you don't really have the option of moving it around.

One of the things that's next on my list is something I've always wanted to do. I was working at it when I started making the perpetual calendar that Bill has: a carriage clock. So we're thinking of doing something, I dunno, six by three inches and indiscriminate depth.

I'm not that strong in mathematics, so I have a friend who is a mathematician who I can talk to about, "I need ratios, I need something, gimme some answers, I've got stuff out to about six decimals places," and he can go on forever and he'll have great fun doing it.

So the carriage clock I'm looking at making will be a going barrel. Fusee's are great, they look wonderful. Damned useless. Right? They look nice but completely useless. They have no real point in modern horology but they look nice and the chain looks nice and that's why it's there. Mainsprings are much better now than they used to be when the fusee was invented.

In doing this clock I've learned a lot about mainsprings I didn't know as well. I now wind and make my own mainsprings instead of buying them. This is because I had to, not because I wanted to.

There's a going barrel on the clock, a tourbillon visible from the dial, not from above, with a co-axial escapement, and I have George Daniels permission to use it, and it'll be solar/sidereal time with solar and sidereal seconds, equation of time and phases of the moon. John Kirk - you've probably seen GearTrains.com? He's the guy I'm talking about. I asked him - he has one of my clocks that I made. The normal lunar trains in the moon calendar that are done in clocks are not very accurate. They've been using the same - they just started to change in the last couple of years. I think Ulysse Nardin and Audemars started the ball rolling and IWC, in doing more accurate trains.

The train I used in this clock I think is accurate to about nine decimal places which I think is an error of about five minutes in three years or something. Well, John in looking for other train formulas, I asked him, "Can we do better than this?" Sometimes it's weird numbers that don't match up or are not mathematically balanced but he's actually come up with a train that's one-point-six seconds in five years. It's a couple of odd wheels and there's five wheels in it, but that's the sort of thing I'm aiming at doing.

The equation of time will also be set at lattitude and longitude because it varies for wherever you are. It's something that people don't understand. I think there is, Ulysse Nardin - or - they make one of their watches that has equation of time and they will make it to wherever your home address is - Audemars Piguet, right. Other than that, the rest is put on rather as - let's say decoration, as they're wrong, not quite what's there.

So I'm trying to do things and trying to make things and trying to show forward, or the way to go. What's in here, with the exception of the stone, that I drilled the holes in the base, which was no fun, and except for the fusee chain and the material in the mainspring, I made everything, including the screws. The big ones, the smaller screws that are elsewhere I don't - I can buy those. Other than that, the dial, hands, wheels, trains, pinions, arbors, the whole lot, I made. I'm not very - and Curtis and I have had this discussion backwards and forwards - I'm not very supportive of people who buy parts in.

I think if you want to do it, and claim yourself to be a maker, do it, be a maker. And at least do it a couple of times. You may find, OK, I can do it somehow else, maybe I can get the train and a few things made in some other way but I think in reality, you have to be able to at some point have done it and say that you've done it and prove it.

Once you've got it then, you can actually go through it but I think the temptation is, "Well, let's get the wheels and pinions in. OK, well that's not bad. Maybe we can buy the barrel in, how 'bout let's do the escapement. Look, why don't we just buy an ETA movement and just plate it up and put my name on it." And at the end of it, that's what most of the Swiss are doing. The Swiss have lost their identity in my mind to a great extent.

There was once - every factory - and those who've been to the Jura know what it was like. Each village had several watch factories and the first time I ever went to the place on a train everybody went, "I remember this is where. . ."

Well, of course wonderful, but those names have all come under a conglomerate which get pulled out of a hat and they have a different name and a different dial and fortunately the Swiss are very clever at marketing and advertising and tout the thing the way it is. But we've all opened it up and seen the same movement finished in a slightly different fashion which is a little disappointing because the variation isn't there.

I think the AHCI members, the independents, are sort of going in the right way. But they're having the same battle and the problem is recognition. Which is the same problem I have to be honest, is recognition.

Except at least in the watch world you can pack up half a dozen of your watches in a bag and go to Basel fair. I get stuck with freight [motioning to the clock beside him]. And life becomes a lot harder in doing that. And the clock syndrome is always, you know, that clocks thing.

I have a trainee up where I am, a young guy who's really good. I've tried a couple of people over the years and never succeeded but his kid is like a sponge. You can tell him something on a deadbeat escapement, the first couple we did, I did the basics on it, and the next time I said, "OK, this is how we do it." I showed him how I do the drawing which is not orthodox, it's probably not even accepted.

There's a discussion I had with a physicist named Alan Bromley who died recently in Melbourne - in Sydney. He said, "It can't work." I said, "That's fine, I know it can't work. But tell me why it's ticking. I don't have a problem." - I'll show him [his trainee] that, I'll show him once and he knows how to do it. And the next time I can just stand over and watch, I don't have to say a word and he follows it through and it's really, really nice to see someone doing that.

When I took myself to Europe in the 70's to learn more, it was very difficult. The situation is far better today than is was thirty years ago. There's more materials available, there's far more information. Forty years ago, this group wouldn't exist, there was no interest. There's more information, there's more tooling available, you can ask more poeple, there's more interest in it, in watches and in clocks. That much has gotten better but it's also necessary to kinda have people to carry on things and hopefully he'll be better than what I am because that's what I aim at.

One of the things I've also taken to using, and perhaps as watch people you don't use it, but you've all seen how a pendulum works. The pendulum rod is here and the crutch goes between it. I had seen this system and I use an asymmetric crutch. Those that have seen it before recognize it, but it just runs on one side.

Instead of having crutch shake, having it too loose or too tight, you can never have it perfect because there's always thermal problems or dust. With the asymmetric crutch it just rests on the side. It's not new, I saw it in Vienna and they used it a lot in the late 1800's. I saw a Berthoud last year with an asymmetric crutch on it that was even nicer than mine.

Since I did that, the first few people that saw it said, "It can't work." "Well, it looks like it's ticking to me, you know?" "Well it's only got impulse on one side!" "I'll believe anything, just tell me where it's gone," and so far no one ever came up with an answer.

The real trick is to it, basically, it's lopsided so - if it was weighted exactly to the middle it wouldn't work but because it's weighted on one side it does. But I don't generally like to generally tell people that.

It works fine. Since having put that on, I've never used that on another - the old system, on another clock. The asymmetric crutch is so easy to put in beat in any situation. I've a little locknut that goes up to run it up tight and it runs really good. It's a beautiful thing. I'm surprised it hadn't been used more extensively in other areas.

Are there any questions?

Have you ever made a clock with a gravity escapement?

No, Curtis and I were talking about that today. The main reason against that, and the English did make some last year, I'm sorry, last century. The main reason against it, they were made for big heavy clocks, with big heavy - have you ever seen one?

Not a big one.

They're heavy items but what they really need is big heavy pendulums. Usually longer than a second, second and a quarter, second and a half. They don't like short pendulums. A meter pendulum, or a seconds, is too short for a gravity escapement in reality although they've used them. But they didn't prove super successful. They're great in tower clocks, where they were designed for, but otherwise they weren't that great.

David, you've seen my Sinclair Harding table regulator? It has a six-legged gravity escapement with a pendulum about that long [8 inches?]? What's he doing different?

He's basically, he's got a very heavy brass ball on a very fine piece of wire. So what happens here is - it's made it work. And it does work really well, but I think the long term effects on it are not terribly stable. It doesn't have that mass. You've seen like, if you have a heavy pendulum, you'll start it swinging and it swings and swings and swings, without the clock attached. It takes ages to slow down and that's what they seem to work better with. They used it last century in floor clocks, seconds pendulum regulators, and they didn't seem to be terribly successful.

I must say I had a hard time getting mine it running, but it's been running for ten years.

Yeah, well that's good! When it comes to that it's good, but do you know what the timekeeping on it is?

It's very good.

Well, they might've made it work. But generally speaking it hasn't worked very well which is why I haven't used a gravity. I thought about it several times but I was - the six-legged and the three legged is used as well - but the six-legged is the better version. But it is a big thing to turn around.

What about balances as opposed to pendulums? When you were talking about the co-axial, I assume that's going to use a balance, have you made clocks with balances before?

No, I haven't. I've made bits and pieces and components for them but not the whole thing. I've thought about it over the years and thinking a lot - and honestly the best book you can get anything from is from Daniel's "Watchmaking" book in my mind.

Yes it's difficult, but it's not as hard as - you can put limitations on yourself or you can just do it. And yes, it's not easy, but I don't think it's as bad as people think it is. The bigger problem, quite honestly, would be getting a hairspring.

That's one of the difficult areas. At one time you could buy - it used to be in Los Angeles, not far from here, there was something called the LA Hairspringing Company. You could go down and you could just - up until maybe thirty years ago - you could have anything that needed a hairspring that was missing and they would time a new haispring on it.

Well, they're gone and so are all those supplies and bits. You can find them from time to time but you don't know what you're really getting. And usually they were blued steel hairsprings. And today you can use Nivarox, which is a much better spring.

I would use a stainless steel screwless balance. Because I happen to like it. Other people - what was that one I had on the screen?

Derek Pratt.

Yeah, Derek Pratt had a nice tourbillon carriage with a screwed balance which is really nice but I would just personally prefer something else.

David Walter can be reached at:
486 First Street
Solvang, CA 93463
Tel. 805-688-6222 or 805-452-8881
David@DavidWalter.net

_john

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