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WILCO
05-18-2013, 02:44 PM
Good professionals to have in your rolodex. My Hamilton pocket watch needs some repair and I was able to locate an old school watchmaker who loves watches and clocks. I picked his brain for twenty minutes and he taught me a thing or two about pocket watches and their design. What professionals are in your rolodex?

geargnasher
05-18-2013, 02:58 PM
My dad has a gold Hamilton that was his father's, they both carried it for many years and dad has had it re-worked several times, but the only watchsmith who could make it right around here has passed. Now the hairspring is broken, would you mind PM'ing contact information for the gentleman you found?

Everyone will find that they need to have a GOOD lawyer, doctor, dentist, barber, and auto mechanic to be only a phone call away.

Some of us need a good gunsmith and mould maker on standby. Is anyone else finding expertise in the skilled trades to be a scarce commodity these days?

Gear

km101
05-18-2013, 03:53 PM
Most of the professionals in my Rolodex are doctors unfortunately! I know two excellent gunsmiths and a good auto mechanic. I hope these are the only professionals I will need.

TXGunNut
05-18-2013, 04:18 PM
I'm a pretty fair bicycle mechanic, partly because I couldn't bring myself to patronize the few that I had to deal with. I helped maintain a fleet of police bikes and even helped run a few schools for aspiring bike mechanics for our department and others. I was also the standby mechanic when they had bike officer schools to fix whatever they broke in class that day.
Working on bikes is like working on guns. It's a labor of love and you'll never get rich doing it. I suspect working on watches isn't much different.

ga41
05-18-2013, 10:57 PM
i couldn't afford to own a car if I couldn't work on it myself. I wrenched professionally for quite a while. My brother and son in law are both attorneys....

bhop
05-25-2013, 02:28 PM
scrap/salvage yard. i am a machinist/gunsmith/buildanythingfrommetal kinda guy and i have all the tools but without a cheap place to pick up materials from my tools dont do alot of good. Dentist would be number 1 on my list

bear67
05-25-2013, 08:24 PM
Being retarded, I never wear a watch anymore. It is either day or night and I am hungry or not. But recently my wife's grandmothers mantle clock came into our possession and it need help. I work on anything, engines, electronics guns, tractors, but drew the line at a clock.
Yellow pages had a name and phone number in a small town about 20 miles away. My wife drove over and way out in the country to an older (maybe as old as me)guys house and he fixed it while she waited. He told her when and where it was made and gave her written directions on taking care of it and lubing it. We kept his phone number.

This clock has a neat story. Grandmother Evans, born in 1905, after marriage was living in Alvoid,
Texas and her parents, sister and brother in law drove out from Fort Worth to visit about 1925 and on the way home on a Sunday afternoon were all killed in an accident at a railroad crossing--don't mess with trains. This clock was a wedding gift from her parents--when she was notified of the accident, she stopped the clock and never rewound it again. Leap forward to about 1968 when my wife's brother was 10-11 and without asking he wound and started the clock on the mantle. She ran it until she died, the grandson took it home (he restored clocks as a hobby by this time) and used it until it died. It was not wound for a couple of years and became dusty and then we had it fixed and it runs on our mantle.

BTW my daughters always said that "Daddy can fix anything but a broken heart." and I got to work on their bracelets, necklaces, toys and later cars as well as those of their friends. But I draw the line at clocks and watches.