Silas Tilling Estimates Six-Month Lead Time for Movement Repair; Customer Interprets 'Six Months' as 'Next Tuesday'

A watchmaker quoted six months for a movement repair last Tuesday, and by Friday the customer had been to the counter four times to ask how it was coming along.

Silas Tilling, who runs the bench off Ellis Street, wrote "six months" on the intake ticket himself, in his own hand, and has since written it twice more on two fresh tickets for the same watch. "I said six months," Tilling said. "I've now said it three times, and each time it lands like I've moved the goal."

The watch is a Voss & Marne with a calibre 82 inside, brought in dead. Tilling opened it, put it under the loupe, and found the lower pivot of the escape wheel sheared clean off, which drags the train until the watch stops. The escape wheel for a calibre 82 has not been produced in decades. Sourcing one means a search through movement breakers, then a service, then timing across positions before anyone wears it again. Hence the six months: two of those steps are not bench work at all.

"I heard six months," said the customer, Peter Nunn. "I also heard you're quick. Those two things don't both fit in my head, so I came back to see which one you meant."

Nunn's first question was whether six months counted from the day he asked or the day Tilling said it. His second was whether there was a rush option. His third, on Thursday, was whether the watch could be done in time for a trip he had not yet booked. On Friday he brought a second watch, a quartz piece with a dead battery, and asked whether dropping it off would move the first one up the queue. It would not, Tilling said, and anyway the battery took four minutes and cost eight dollars.

Then Basil Keene entered it. Keene, who runs the rival collecting group across town and shares about half his members with Tilling's, posted a recommendation for a technician who finishes most jobs in two weeks. Nunn forwarded the message. Tilling read it, handed the phone back, and said the other shop was welcome to try, since the problem was not labor.

"Two weeks is what you quote when you haven't looked at the part yet," Tilling said. "I'd rather give him a number he can be angry about now than a number he'll be angry about in March."

Nunn has begun to think of the estimate as a moving target, which in a sense it is: every week he waits, the part has not arrived, and the remaining wait shrinks by nothing at all. He now asks, at each visit, whether the six months is still six months. It is. Tilling keeps columns in his intake book, one for what he quoted, one for what the customer heard, and says the second column is where repairs go to die.

I asked to see the failed part, because I like to hold a thing before I name what it did. Tilling produced the escape wheel on a piece of Rodico, pivot still attached to the broken end. It is a small gear with a tooth count you can't argue with.

Tilling writes his estimates in full words now. The ticket he used to write — 6/12 — came back to him read as an appointment date.