Time on his hands: A rookie tries his own unsteady hand at watch repair

"These are the times that try men's souls."

— Thomas Paine, founding father, 1776

"Now here comes the part where we see how much patience you have."

— Tom Payne, watchmaker, 2006

Tom Payne's slightly impish grin should have tipped me off, but I was paying attention to his words — part invitation, part challenge.

"To really understand what this is all about," he told me. "You're going to have to try it yourself."

If he had been talking about skydiving off the Space Needle, I probably would have said fine, an incomplete understanding will do nicely, thank you.

But how much trouble could I get in just trying to clean a clock?

As it turns out, plenty.

When two black screws the size of this "t" skittered across the table and a piece of brass resembling a tiny replica of Hammering Man's arm dropped to the floor, I realized I was truly out of my element.

Information

To find the watch-repair class and North Seattle Community College's other continuing-education courses, visit www.learnatnorth.org

I took a breath and tried to relax, remembering that Payne had just warned me, "Here comes the part where we see how much patience you have."

But how did I get here in the first place, committing three hours of a Wednesday evening? How did I end up surrounded by people for whom timepieces are mysterious little worlds waiting to be explored?

The answer is simple: I was under the influence of Tom Payne.

Payne, 71, has a contagious fascination with watches, clocks and anything to do with time. He quotes from the book of Genesis, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' " to indicate that the distinction between day and night was humankind's earliest notion of time passing.

By day, he runs the Watch & Battery Center on Lake City Way with his son, Tim. And one evening a week, he teaches watch repair in North Seattle Community College's Continuing Education program.

While the college's main campus near Northgate hosts a program on watch repair as a career, the continuing-ed class has a different personality.

The six to 10 students are hobbyists, mostly middle-age and older. There's the retired surgeon who drives up from Tacoma, the longtime fisherman who keeps 150 watches in a safe, the ecologist restoring a watch that belonged to a friend's grandfather.

Each brings his own project, working in his own world behind his own set of magnifying lenses. But in spare and quiet conversations, they share a sense of exploration and accomplishment as they discuss a particular challenge or admire a well-crafted timepiece.

They don't come here for a set of lectures. They come for the dedicated time and space to pursue their avocation, with the access to tools, equipment and expertise.

Says Bob Breidenthal, 54, an engineering professor, "It's always fun to learn from people who are masters at what they do, and Tom is a master."

At the former Sand Point Elementary School, they meet in a building which, each academic quarter, attracts more than 1,000 students to classes ranging from belly dancing to computer security, Spanish to small-business accounting, deck-building to vegetarian cooking.

Stan Mueller, 75, the former orthopedic surgeon, spent two months cleaning and repairing an early-1900s watch which a friend found among his late wife's belongings.

Mueller works slightly hunched over, the tiny pieces a few inches in front of his nose. He's the picture of intensity, but this is much easier than performing surgery.

"It's not a zero-defect job. If you drop a piece on the ground you just pick it up, clean it off and put it back in."

On my first trip to the class, I watched Mueller and others at work. But I came back at Payne's insistence to try my own unsteady hands at a task.

Mercifully — and correctly — he surmised that a regular-size watch would be too intricate a subject, so he brought an old wind-up travel alarm clock, the kind that collapses into a square leather-bound case.

"To start, you're going to need some eyeballs," he said, handing me a visor with lenses that made everything five times its real size. But as someone who is all thumbs, the visor just made my thumbs that much bigger.

With a set of screwdrivers Payne loaned me, I removed more than a dozen screws of various sizes holding the timepiece together. But they had a tendency to jump away like fleas off a dog's back, and I fumbled to pick them up with my thumb and forefinger.

"Try the tweezers," Payne reminded me.

To my unschooled eye, the workings of the clock looked like a shrunken amusement park of overlapping Ferris wheels, carousels and other carnival rides.

With Payne's help, I eventually got the clock open enough to proceed with the next step, cleaning. Carefully, we placed the parts in a small mesh container, and then into the ultrasonic cleaner, which vibrated the pieces while a yellow fluid bubbled away some of the gunk.

Many timepieces people take for dead are just dirty inside, Payne tells me, noting there are few things a watch-lover enjoys more than bringing a quality piece back from the netherworld of neglect.

Despite his expertise and enthusiasm, Payne didn't get into watch-making until his mid-40s, after he had already spent years working on airplane parts at Boeing, managing the Dick's Drive-In on Broadway and running his own contracting firm.

"As a contractor, I was fixing up houses," he said. "Fixing is fixing. With watches, they're just smaller and you need magnification."

The most experienced student is Anton Larsen, 86, who has been coming to the sessions 17 years. "I'm here so I don't just sit at home and watch TV."

Larsen, who retired from fishing at 65, began working on pocket watches as a boy of 12 in his native Norway, laboring by the light of a kerosene lamp with tools he made himself. After a chat with Larsen, I returned to my own project, the innards of the travel clock now clean, rinsed and dried by the machine.

But of the three dozen pieces in front of me, I could remember where only about a third of them went.

The toughest task — the patience-testing moment Payne had warned about — was getting the tiny pins on the wheels lined up with the brass plates that hold them in place. After several tries, I let Payne help. Minutes later, I marked a small triumph, fitting a brass piece in place with three screws and two doughnut-shaped spacers.

"Now comes the test," Payne said, instructing me to put the winding key in place, crank it and see if the patient would spring to life. Sure enough, the balance wheel, smaller than a dime, swung back and forth rhythmically.

Soon other students were peering over my shoulder, nodding their approval and commenting in low voices, as if I had just rescued a baby robin and they were watching its tiny heart beat.

"What's that called?" I asked Payne, pointing at the moving piece, wanting to make sure I knew its name.

"That," he smiled simply, "is called a miracle."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com