Art of mechanical clock preserved in digital age

Mechanical clocks may seem like quaint, even useless relics in a digital age, but don’t tell Wesley Pyle, owner of Pyle’s Clock Shop in Avondale.

Pyle -- a former car and motorcycle mechanic -- has made his living for 15 years cleaning, repairing and restoring clocks.

In doing do, Pyle is preserving a tradition of craftsmanship, indulging a lifelong love of old things and helping his customers continue to enjoy objects of both practical and sentimental value -- even in a time of cell phones and disposable watches.

In fact, Pyle said he and others like clocks precisely because they’re not ultra-modern gadgets.

“A lot of people are interested in clocks because they’re a useful piece of gear, but they’re antiques,” he said. “You can still wind them up every week and they tell time.”

“It’s the same with motorcycles,” Pyle said. “All the motorcycles I have are old. I don’t like dealing with newer stuff.”

A native of West Chester, Pa., Pyle, 56, started working on motorcycles in Tuscaloosa when he was 13, later working for Smith’s Sport Cycles for over a decade.

He was also 12 or 13 when he fell in love with clocks, during a vacation trip to his grandparents’ Maine cottage, where a previous owner had left some old timepieces.

“Every summer I started fiddling with them,” Pyle recalls. “It became an obsession, something I’ve always had an interest in.”

When Pyle and his wife, Trish Harris, moved to Birmingham in 2000, he began doing repairs for Payne’s Clock Shop in Homewood.

When Payne’s closed in about 2001, Pyle opened his own shop. “I was tired of working on cars,” he said.

In 2008, he moved the shop from English Village to his quaint, 1900-vintage Queen Anne cottage on Fifth Avenue South -- an appropriate location for his repair bench and large menagerie of old timepieces.

There are kitchen clocks, vintage French and American wall clocks and lots of grandfather clocks -- even one from 1984 that plays the University of Alabama fight song.

The attraction is simple, according to Pyle. “I love machines,” he said. “I can look at something, figure out how it works, figure out what’s wrong with it, take it apart and fix it. I guess that’s my gift. I also love antique furniture. Clocks are a really cool combination of antiques and machines.”

Repairing clocks is largely a dying art, according to Pyle.

“There are other people (in metro Birmingham) who do it, maybe not to the extent that I do here,” he said. “I repaired somewhere between 400 and 500 clocks last year. Most of the people who do it are retired and do it on the side.”

Clocks and clock repair were a part of life in America in an earlier time, according to Pyle.

“A hundred years ago, everybody has mechanical clocks, before you had quartz and cell phones and all that junk,” he said,

He read recently that there was a company in Philadelphia in about 1900 or 1910 that had 20 employees who did nothing but clean clocks every day.

Now even cleaning a clock is “more of a craftsman-type of thing,” Pyle said.

Most of the clocks he works on are not extremely valuable, according to Pyle.

“They’re often old family pieces,” he said. “A lot of times, the work I do costs more than the clock is worth, but the clocks have a lot of sentimental value, and it’s worth it for (customers).”

Pyle makes lots of house calls to clean or maintain clocks that are too large or bulky to move. “Grandfather clocks mostly,” he said. “I made two calls this morning before I came in here.”

He also sells some new clocks, including cuckoo clocks and some products from the German maker, Hermle Black Forest.

And Pyle hopes to continue in the trade for another 20 years.

“It’s a lot easier on my back than leaning over a car engine,” he said, laughing.