Haruki Sasaki’s workshop occupies the back room of a shop his father opened in 1968, and the bench he works at, worn smooth at the edges from six decades of use, has outlasted three generations of clocks brought in for repair. He specializes in mechanical movements, the gear-and-spring mechanisms found in longcase clocks, mantel clocks, and the occasional public tower clock, work that has become steadily rarer as quartz and digital timekeeping replaced mechanical movements in almost everything except the objects people keep for their history rather than their accuracy.
How does someone end up training in a trade this specific?
There was no formal school for it when I trained, and there still isn’t much of one. I apprenticed under my father for nine years, and before that, he’d apprenticed under a clockmaker who’d trained in the 1930s. It’s an oral trade, passed hand to hand, which is exactly the problem now, because there are very few of us left to pass it to anyone. I get calls sometimes from young people who want to learn, but I can only take one apprentice at a time, realistically, and the training takes years before they’re trusted with a client’s clock unsupervised.
What actually goes wrong inside a mechanical clock that’s a century old?
Wear, mostly, in places you’d never guess. The pivots, the small points where a gear’s axle rests in its bearing, wear down over decades of rotation, and once the wear is bad enough, the gear starts to sit at a slight angle, which throws off the whole train of gears after it. People bring me a clock that’s losing four minutes a day and assume something is broken. Usually nothing is broken. Something has simply worn, gradually, the way anything does that’s been running continuously since before either of us was born.
A clock that’s stopped is an easy problem. A clock that’s still running, just wrong, is the interesting one, because it’s telling you something has changed and you have to work out what.
Do you repair with original parts, or do you sometimes have to make new ones?
Often I have to make them. A gear from a clock built in 1890 isn’t a part you can order, it was likely hand-finished even when it was made, to a tolerance specific to that clock. I cut a replacement on a small lathe, by hand, matching the tooth count and profile of the original as closely as I can, then fit and adjust it until the whole train runs smoothly again. It can take a full day to make one gear the size of a coin. Clients are sometimes surprised the labor costs more than the material. The material is almost nothing. The labor is everything.
What’s the relationship people have with these clocks, the ones worth this kind of repair?
It’s rarely about telling time, people have a phone in their pocket for that. It’s usually a family object, a grandparent’s clock, something that’s been in a house for three generations and has a sound the family associates with that house. I had a client last year whose mother’s clock had stopped the week she died, and it had sat silent for two years before the daughter brought it to me, not really to fix the clock, I think, but to hear it running again. That’s not unusual. People don’t say it in those words, but you learn to hear it in how they talk about the clock.
Do you worry about what happens to this trade after you stop working?
Some days. I’ve trained one apprentice fully, and she has her own shop now in another city, so the trade continues, at least for another generation. But there were dozens of us in this country when my father started, and there are perhaps twelve now, and I don’t think that number goes back up. I’ve made peace with being a caretaker for something that may end. It doesn’t change how carefully I do the work. If anything, it makes me more careful. Every clock I get right is one more clock still running when I’m not the one anyone can call anymore.