WITH a dodgy right hand as the result of a stroke, deteriorating eyesight and at the grand old age of 91, Archie McQuater is approaching the puzzle of how to complete his latest remarkable timepiece with one eye fixed firmly on the clock.
Scotland’s “father time” has captured how he wants his latest creation – a highly complex automaton clock – to look in his mind’s eye. There are no drawings or carefully sketched designs to work from – instead, the nation’s oldest clockmaker’s remarkable approach to something so complex and intricate that it would leave the rest of us completely baffled is to draw on an astonishing encyclopaedic knowledge of clock-making, and casually make it up as he goes along.
%image('10319814', type="article-full", alt="Archie McQuater working o n the clock he designed himself at his Edinburgh home")
The 19in tall arch dial clock he is crafting at his Edinburgh workshop will eventually feature a family of delicate twittering robins, each carefully crafted from a brass frame covered by moulded copper and beautifully painted.
At the designated time, the male bird will twirl and the female burst into activity to busily tend her nest of chirruping chicks, while in the background a railway bridge with a passing engine is lit, illuminating the family scene and picking up individual blades of grass on the rolling landscape beyond.
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It might sound a tiny bit kitsch, but in reality Archie’s stunning clocks are unique works of art both inside and out. Capable of fetching £10,000 apiece – the price put on a highly complicated Ptolemaic planetarium featuring six individual dials – they are coveted for his attention to detail, and his ability to turn handcrafted tiny wheels and gears to precise accuracy while overcoming perplexing challenges along the way.
But as Archie knows better than most, there’s no halting the hands of time. He’s already spent three and a half years making his automaton clock and it’s highly likely that, sadly, it will be his last. What he hopes most is that he’ll live long enough to complete it.
“The clock is purely mechanical,” he says. “The birds’ song was going to be created using little bellows, but it was proving too difficult to do and I’ve not got enough time life-wise to spend on it.”
%image('10319824', type="article-full", alt="Detail of the mechanical birds incorporated in Archie's design")
He insists he’s being serious, even though Archie appears to be fairly adept at defying time. He’s battled through two major strokes and several minor ones which have hampered his movement on his right side, has macular degeneration in his right eye which makes his skill all the more impressive, while his days of tinkering with the tiny inner workings of watches became too tricky when he hit his mid-60s.
Yet this remarkable nonagenarian craftsman still “clocks on” to work three days a week to carry out clock repairs for his customers at Craiglea Clocks in Morningside. He said: “I’ve not been defeated by a repair yet. Every one I get, I make work.”
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While for further proof that you’re never too old for anything, he recently became the oldest baptism at his local Catholic Church after deciding that after nine decades he was ready to join the flock.
At a time when debate rages over a suggestion that the minimum state pension age should be raised to 75, Archie – who turned his attention to clockmaking after taking early retirement from electronic engineering job with Ferranti at 59 – would appear to epitomise the argument to keep soldiering on.
He said: “People look forward to retirement so much that when they do retire they find they have nothing to do. Should they retire at 75? Well, you can have people who are ‘young’ at 75 or old long before their years. “I’m self-employed, this is my hobby but I’m getting paid to do it.”
Besides, he can hardly retire when there’s so much to do. A local priest has handed him a battered and bruised family clock which hasn’t worked for a century since it was thrown to the ground in a fit of grief after dreadful news filtered home from the First World War trenches. Despite it being in delivered in a carrier bag looking like scrap, he hopes to have it ticking along.
He said:“I don’t use drawings, I just make it all up as I go along. I say to people that God forgot to give me a brain, and instead he put my brain in my hands as an afterthought. I suppose it’s a gift.”
He designed his latest clock’s movement himself and enlisted a cabinet maker to design the clock case. But it’s the complicated automaton feature, which runs through a 37-second sequence of dozens of movements comprising the singing robins, the mother feeding her chicks in their nest against a country scene illuminated with LED lights for sunshine, that makes it particularly remarkable.
%image('10319827', type="article-full", alt="Archie has already been working on the intricate clock for three and a half years")
It’s not the first problem he’s overcome: in the past, he’s stunned fellow members of the British Horological Institute when he unveiled a unique tidal clock which predicted the rise and wane of the tides using both the sun and moon. The clock, a labour of love which took four years to complete, differed significantly from other tidal clocks which only use the moon’s gravitational pull and as a result tend to run around an hour out of time.
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Indeed, the challenge of creating a sun and moon tidal clock was so complex that it had frustrated craftsmen for almost 300 years.
Despite the rise of digital clocks and smart watches, Archie says there is still demand from people who love the “ticktock” of a real clock. He added: “There’s one man who brought me a clock for repair who had 80 clocks in his house. Another friend has 14 grandfather clocks,” he points out.
“Funnily enough,” he says, “I don’t even wear a watch.”
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