(PHOTOS) The Clock Repairman's Apprentice

The etching is invisible.

The lines loop and whirl across a silver plate inside the pocket watch. Most watches in that bygone style have such designs, but prying open the back is the only way to see them.

It’s called damascene, and it has no real purpose. Those swirls are a quiet message of pride from one watchmaker to another. Customers—those ignorant of the craft’s arcane arts—will never see it. But watchmakers decades down the road will peer through their loupes, nod their heads and know that, indeed, a craftsman built this piece.

On a recent Thursday, clock repairman Joff Simmons is initiating 16-year-old Will Dziuk into those secrets. Dziuk discovered a century-old pocket watch at his great uncle’s farm a couple weeks earlier. The watch worked when Dziuk first found it, but it eventually stopped. He didn’t care.

“I was sitting at dinner, and I couldn’t let go of it,” Dziuk says. “I was just intrigued, you know.”

Many boys would have soon forgotten the watch. A few would have held onto it but never felt the need to have it repaired. Even fewer would have taken the watch in to be fixed.

But Dziuk had other ideas. He wanted to fix the watch himself. So his father talked with Blackstone Clock Repair owner Mark Purdy, who allowed the boy to spend a few hours in his shop each week learning to repair the newly discovered watch.

The ad hoc apprenticeship begins with a practice watch so Dziuk won’t accidentally damage his treasure. Simmons passes the boy a loupe to place over his eye and begins guiding him through the disassembly process.

“We always treat (the watch) as something precious,” Simmons intones. “Obviously, that’s been dinged and beaten around a bit, but we still treat it with respect.”

Dziuk has long had a fondness for mechanical items. He still recalls learning about the six simple machines at the Minnesota Waldorf School. As he got older, he embarked on his own projects. His favorite so far is a scissor extender with a magnifying glass attached.

Strictly speaking, the extender isn’t all that useful. But it reminds him of gadgets from the world of steampunk—a mechanical mix of steam power, the Victorian era and science fiction or fantasy. The device is something a detective in those fictional universes might use, Dziuk explains.

With the practice watch open, Simmons patiently coaches Dziuk on more real-world skills that would be recognizable to real-world Victorian-era watchmakers.

By and large, mechanical watches and clocks operate the same way. There’s a power source and a timekeeping mechanism that releases the power at regular intervals—ensuring the hands tick accurately. 

In a clock, the power usually comes from weights; in a watch it comes from springs. In a clock, a pendulum serves as the timekeeping element; in a watch, a balance wheel does the job—oscillating back and forth at a constant rate.

As Dziuk takes apart the practice watch, Simmons explains this all, occasionally visiting mantle clocks in the midst of repair to illustrate a point.

The basics sound simple, but the loupe over Dziuk’s eye unveils a world of gears.

“It was 20 times more intricate than I thought it would be,” he said later.

Simmons shepherds the boy through the different steps—encouraging him to hazard his own guesses at critical junctures. Soon Dziuk is pinching ant-sized springs to burn off power and placing his thumb over screwdrivers just so to keep the screws from skittering away.

Before it’s time to go, Dziuk and Simmons take the opportunity to open the watch that brought the boy into the shop in the first place. They find dirt and grime has fouled the delicate mechanisms the watch relies on, a common problem among watches. Dziuk will give the gears a thorough detailing when he's learned enough.

For now, the watch sits in his pocket—invisible but no less resonant to him.

“I'm amazed that my energy will power this little thing that's going to run all day,” he says.

Maybe Dziuk will use the skills he learns at Blackstone Manor to become a clockmaker. Maybe he won’t. Like his steampunk magnifying glass and the unseen damascene, the work isn’t really about a specific purpose.

It’s about pride in craftsmanship—regardless of whether anyone else knows.