| Tick Tock Towers By Hal Brown J.C. Woodward helped ring in the millennium in style this year. Bells at a New York church sounded for the first time in years after Woodward restored its 1901 tower clock. Woodward is co-owner of The Clockery, an East Norwalk business that is generally confined to the smaller intricacies in wall clocks and such. Woodward entered the tower clock restoration business through an offhand conversation with a customer over the clockworks of a tower clock that graced the floor at the shop. "He looked at the clock and we got to talking and I said, 'Jeez, I'd love to restore a tower clock some time.'" Without entr�e into the field, and of little mind to work up a sales pitch to owners of clock towers, the idea remained floating in a professional fantasyland. The customer, Joe Duffy, owned a company that supplies architectural items for churches: steeples, carillons-and, formerly, tower clocks. Duffy was working with the contractor restoring the chapel of the Yale University School of Divinity. "When he (Duffy) became aware of the Yale job, he called me," Woodward said. The idea still faced the roadblock of a few hundred clocks at the shop, all needing repairs, all promised to be back to their owners in about six months. Woodward, a rock climber, mentioned the job to a climbing partner, Ian Pownall. Professionally trained as a mechanical engineer, Pownall had also formally apprenticed as a toolmaker in his native England. "He had all the metalworking skills, if not the knowledge of clockmaking, so the two of us did the Yale clock together," Woodward said. (Woodward also holds an engineering degree, in electrical engineering.) Since then, they've done two more tower clocks. One in the Scovill Public Library in Salisbury, Conn., and the most recent in Mount Vernon (N.Y.) First United Methodist Church. The library clock, he said, was very nice. "That one struck a peal of five church bells, the biggest weighed the better part of a ton," he said. "It would play music every 15 minutes." Most of the tower clocks he's seen start out like the Mount Vernon church tower clock. "The clock had fallen into disrepair and had been inactive for 17 years," he said. "When we got there the mechanism was covered with dirt and pigeon droppings and non-functional." They restored the clock piece by piece, fabricating a lot of them. To top it off Woodward and Pownall gold-leafed the hands, like they had been when the clock was new, back in 1901, fresh from Seth Thomas Co. The only modern touch came with electric winders. "The original was manually wound once a week," Woodward said. "The problem with that is the weight to power the bell strike was a thousand pounds. It was raised three stories in the tower. "If the cable ever broke, or if there were any other kind of catastrophic failure it could have destroyed the tower. "We didn't modify the clock in any way, but we had an electric winder operate a much smaller weight more frequently. It's a couple of hundred pounds that moves through only two feet off the floor. Even in the event of a catastrophic failure it would do no great harm- and of course the church doesn't have to have someone climb the tower once a week to keep it running." |
 |
 |
| Back |
|
 |
| Directory |
| Next |