Behind the TIMES.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

Tick. Tock. Times 2,000.

That's the sound you hear upon entering The Clockmaker's Gallery - the sound of about 2,000 clocks ticking and tocking, binging and bonging.

It's enough to make you cuckoo.

Unless you're a "clockaholic," like the folks who work in the west Eugene shop, and the regulars who frequent it.

Busy as they are, the clockmakers there have nothing but time on - and in - their hands. It's all around them - these clocks and this rare art form surviving in a digital age.

"It's definitely an anachronism," says Chuck Christensen, owner of the business along with his wife, Barbara, that he began 31 years ago. "But it's also romantic. I would say 80 percent of the industry is based on sentimentality. That's rewarding."

While Christensen is a certified clockmaker, the young man he took on a dozen years ago, Wesley Niemczak, is a certified master clockmaker. According to the Ohio-based American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute, he passed his AWCI certification test in 2001. Christensen says Niemczak is the youngest ever certified as a master by the institute. The AWCI couldn't confirm that, but considering Niemczak was just 23 when he was certified, and that becoming a master requires five years of combined apprenticeship and working as a certified clockmaker before the master exam can be taken, that's probably a good bet.

Whatever the case, Barbara Christensen says her husband and Niemczak and other clockmakers "are keeping this dying art form alive."

It's an art that began probably eight centuries ago in Europe, when it's believed the first mechanical clocks were made. It was time to move on from sundials, hourglasses and water clocks.

Mechanical clocks, such as grandfather and cuckoo clocks, are weight-driven. They're powered by the gravitational pull of slowly falling weights that hang on cables or chains, and regulated by pendulums. They have components such as gears, levers, hammers, rods and springs.

Their intricate inner workings require attention to detail. That's where the clockmaker comes in. Most clockmakers today do not actually make clocks, although a master clockmaker must demonstrate that sort of knowledge and skill before becoming certified. Rather, they repair and rebuild the movements - the inner workings - of existing clocks.

'Something's ticking'

"From the age of 5, when I could read and write, I was sat down on the bench and started working on clocks," says the 30-year-old Niemczak, who grew up in Corvallis and began his apprenticeship with Christensen right out of of high school.

His father, Walter Niemczak, is a certified clockmaker and master watchmaker who is now retired but once owned his own shop in Corvallis, Time Specialities, Wesley Niemczak says. His father and Christensen have known each other for years.

"I remember going down the stairs of the Quackenbush Building when I was 2," says Wesley Niemczak, who lives in Corvallis and commutes to Eugene to practice his craft.

Christensen opened his business in 1976 in the basement of Quackenbush's, the longtime former Eugene hardware store. It was all of about 500 square feet then. He came to Eugene in 1970 from California to study at the University of Oregon. He was working on his doctorate in philosophy, with the goal of becoming a professor, when he wandered into a clock shop on River Road owned by Clinton Chezem. He bought an old clock, had a problem with it and took it back. He and Chezem began to tinker on it together.

"Hey, you're pretty good," Christensen remembers Chezem saying. He asked the Ph.D. student if he had time to help out in the shop. Christensen ended up working part time for Chezem.

"My love for it increased more than my appreciation for teaching philosophy," says Christensen, who flew to Madison, Wis., to check out a job offer teaching logic at the University of Wisconsin, but passed.

"I got off the plane and it was 40 below," he remembers.

Instead, he began an apprenticeship with Chezem and then opened his own shop with 12 clocks and $500. His friends, not to mention his first wife, thought he was, uh, cuckoo. In fact, he came home one day and his wife had left a note saying to go ahead and open his clock shop, but she was leaving him.

He would later marry Barbara, who had her own gig cutting hair upstairs in the Quackenbush Building. In 1980, they moved the shop to Garfield Street in west Eugene, where a big part of their business now is watch repair.

Having a Ph.D. in philosophy, her husband is always thinking, Barbara Christensen says. "I always kid him - 'something's ticking,' ' she says, pointing to her head.

Cuckoo for clocks

The Christensens travel the world in search of rare clocks. Their shop is filled with them. The oldest is a 1665 water clock from Chester, England, that Chuck Christensen found in Princeton, N.J. It is functional and a treat to look at, but it's not for sale.

There's a Swiss "atmos" clock for $2,595. It's an unusual clock "that lives on air" says the sign next to it.

As its name suggests, the clock runs on the atmosphere. Fluctuations in temperature move a capsule sealed with gas and liquid inside the clock, which keeps the mindspring humming.

There's an 1888 clock from Paris called "Anglique Garden." It sells for $2,685 and has an ornate golden angel with wings next to the timepiece. There are grandfather clocks everywhere, and plenty of cuckoo clocks, too, including an "Original Rombo" - made by Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks in Germany - that goes for $849.

But the Christensens say they are not in this for the money. Chuck Christensen tells anyone showing an interest in getting into this rare throwback of a business that you must do it for the love.

"You've got to love clocks and the craft," he says. "If you love the money, this is the wrong profession."

Niemczak works away on a movement. It's a complete cleaning and rebuilding job that will probably take eight to 12 hours and cost the owner of this Gazo grandfather clock about $825 for labor and materials. The movement is badly worn due to lack of service or poor service in the past, Niemczak says.

"People just don't think of having their clocks cleaned," says Niemczak, adding that mechanical clocks should be oiled at least every three years. "Clocks work harder than cars," he says. "They go 24/7."

As Niemczak disassembles the movement's parts, placing them in a large black tray, Christensen playfully pretends to rearrange the many pieces.

He and apprentice David Margolis, however, say that Niemczak is so skilled at what he does that it probably wouldn't matter if you placed them in a bucket and shook them up.

"I'd be willing to bet he could put it together blindfolded," says Margolis, a self-employed computer repairman who was offered an apprenticeship in the shop six or seven months ago after he came in to fix some equipment and Christensen noticed how skilled he was with his hands.

"He thought I had a good eye for detail," Margolis says.

So now he, too, has fallen in love with an art form that hopefully won't go the way of the dodo bird anytime soon.

Christensen doesn't believe so. There will always be a need for clockmakers, especially at museums, he says, as time marches on all around him.