I wouldn’t mind if I fell flat on my nose in front of an old watch repair store that is closing down right now because I’m so completely out of mechanical watches it’s almost unbelievable.  Most of the time I’ve had a chance to buy more bits and pieces and keep it all up to date without actually running out of anything, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to find these treasures.

At least to a decent price. What you find online at places like Etsy and eBay are often nothing but 2 or 3 watches and the price tag is rarely worth the trouble. And when the price is decent, the shipping will cost a fortune and take forever instead, something that is very common at least at Etsy.

On eBay there are way too many sellers who restrict their sales of old mechanical watches for the purpose of watch repairs only, and I know that makes sense too since they are dedicated to keep old watches alive.
The perfect buy would be a big box of mixed watches, both wrist watches and pocket watches. All mechanical. The problem with newer watches is of course that under the hood there’s nothing but a battery, a few metal pieces and then the rest is plastic. Whenever I bump into one of those they go straight in the trash. Can’t use those for anything so I rarely open them at all.

At least if you ask me, the digital era stinks sometimes. I love my computer and I use my cell phone a lot…the Wii is fun now and then, but when it comes to watches and clocks I want them without digital components. And I can’t for the life of me imagine that there’s a lack of old non-functional mechanical watches either. I’m sure a lot of people have plenty of them in a box in the attic without even being aware of it. Or they already threw them out, which is the most common scenario.

Pocket watches is a completely different thing though. If you’ve got pocket watches in a box in the attic you usually know about it. They might not work or the keys are long gone, but since you don’t know anything about them you won’t trow them away either. They might be valuable. And they just might, that’s true. There are ways to find out, in some cases it’s easy if the pocket watches are of the more common kind. It all depends on where you are.
Then of course there are pocket watches without the financial value, but with a sentimental value that makes them collect dust. Sentimental value is difficult to put a number on and I’ve saved pocket watches myself for the same reason until I got sick and tired of them taking up space in my jewellery box and pack them whenever I moved.

For a while I had suppliers whom I bought most of my old watches from, but since this is about old things that aren’t manufactured any more, it always comes to an end. Or their prices are no longer acceptable with the shrinking lots of watches they sell. Unfortunately, the demand for these mechanical pieces are big enough to allow bigger price tags and at some point you have to put up a limit to how much you are willing to pay. If I charge too much for the items I make, I won’t be able to sell them at all, which means that in the long run I will lose money. And even though I’m passionate about this kind of design I still need to make some sort of profit. Otherwise I might as well keep everything I put together.

That said, I should probably put up some of my current designs on eBay even though I told myself a while back that I wouldn’t do that again. I had a lot of problems with flaky customers on there in the end, so I decided to stay away.
But…I’ve got a good reputation on eBay and never really had any big problems selling, so….we’ll see. In any case, I need more watches. Period.