April 15, 2007

Time after time
Craig Bergsma keeps the watchmaking art alive in The Dalles

By CORY ELDRIDGE
of The Chronicle

     By the time Craig Bergsma reached the wizened age of 9 he could overhaul an outboard engine. Gripping wrenches in his little hands and assessing the problems with his ever-larger mind, Bergsma could open a sputtering motor and, by day’s end, send it speeding a boat across the water.
     “It’s amazing to me now, because I have no idea how I did that,” Bergsma says, sitting in his work room in The Dalles. He still has the full head of hair from his childhood, though flares of gray streak the brown. But if his hands and features turned gruff, though not hardened, over the years, his eyes still reveal his lifelong curiosity.
     By 1966, when Bergsma turned 22, he had souped up several hotrods and was repairing propeller engines for the Air Force in Japan.
     That year he bought a small mechanical wonder, a Seiko chronographic watch, and, without realizing, he planted a love affair in his mind that wouldn’t blossom for more than 30 years.
     He finished his military service, studied metallurgical engineering, raced sailboats and remote-controlled planes, collected old radios, kept tinkering with cars, created new types of aluminum alloys, and never thought much of watches.
But by the late 1990s, cars didn’t interest Bergsma much, he stopped racing planes, and he sold most of the radios. He still worked as Northwest Aluminum Specialties Inc.’s product development manager, but he needed a hobby.
     Without much thought, he bought 26 busted Russian and Swiss mechanical watches for $26. Hunched over a fold-up table, holding a magnifying glass in his left hand, he opened the first Swiss watch, intending, on his first try, to repair the tiny springs, gears and jewels and hear the mechanical rhythm of a running watch. When he finished, the old Swiss didn’t just not tick; it had no hope to ever tock again.
     The next three didn’t survive either.
     “It wasn’t readily intuitive as to how it worked,” Bergsma says. “I broke a lot of parts, and it was pretty obvious after I’d tried it a couple times that no magic was going to happen.”
     Bergsma says that he can fix any machine if he can read its manual, and after reading more than thirty watch repair books he repaired and then sold 15 of those 26 watches. Then he bought and repaired a few hundred more.
     “I bought six chronograph movements on eBay for a bargain, and one of those had a case,” Bergsma says. “I got that movement running, put it in the case, cleaned the case up and sold that one watch for twice as much as I paid for those six parts. That’s when the light went on.”
     In 2001, Bergsma started Chronodeco, a watch company focusing on making mechanical chronographs (watches that include a stopwatch) rooted in the Art Deco movement of the 1920s through ‘40s.
     The next year he released the Metropolis, a limited-edition watch made from half-century-old unused casings and dials and refurbished movements (the watch motor). The first 10 took four months to sell, then International Wristwatch, a high-end magazine for watch enthusiasts, profiled the Metropolis and Chronodeco. The remaining 20 watches sold out in a month.
     “It’s hard to compare it to anything else ... I don’t know of anyone who did it the way I did: the hard way,” Bergsma says. “It was a feeling of acomplishment. It was nice.”
     His next line of watches sold out in three months, and the third, with a price of nearly $1,400, has sold steadily since its release in 200-.
     To picture a Chronodeco watch, think of men in hats wearing impeccable suits and trench coats standing in a shadowy alley in Italy or France. Think of the watch Humphery Bogart would wrap around his wrist in “The Maltese Falcon.” That’s what a Chronodeco looks like.
     But underneath the graceful, masculine lines of Bergsma’s watches, the precision of the assembly that keeps a watch running for two days with only a few turns of a knob is his true accomplishment. International Wristwatch called him a master watchmaker when he released his newest line. He’s done it for just eight years.
     “There are only about 500 watchmakers in the United States now,” Bergsma says. “But the people who can work on a vintage chronograph like this in the United States, there might be a couple dozen.”
     Bergsma describes watchmakers as fanatics, and though his eyes or veins don’t pop as he talks about watches, Bergsma exudes enthusiasm. He stands up and down from his chair to grab a failed watch experiment (including a movement plated in 24 karat gold with a matching face) or a peculiar piece from his collection (the oddest being a 1970s watch with a gnarly leather strap KISS would salivate over).
     Bergsma refurbished almost all of the watches in his collection, replating the gold, silver, or nickel casing, polishing the dials and hands, and fixing the complicated movements at the heart of the watch.
     “It’s the satisfaction of taking something that’s old and beatup and not working anymore and fixing it up and trying to make it as new as I can again,”Bergsma says.
     At an age when many guys refurbish a hotrod or buy a muscle car to relive their glory days, Bergsma opened up an old Swiss watch. He held the tiny watchmaking tools in his gruff hands and he assessed the problems with his ever-larger mind. Over the past eight years, he hasn’t just learned something new, he’s mastered it, created his own product, and watched it succeed.