This is Dick Groening.

He's the owner of Nectar Lines watch and clock in Old Town, Saginaw.

If you go around back, you can watch the hammers as they hit the chime rods.

He's.

Dick is a watchmaker or horologist.

His shop is full of great sounds.

His favorite.

This is a rare watch in my whole 55 years that I've had.

Maybe.

Three of them come in for a service.

At Nuechterlines, they service and fix watches and clocks and sell pre-owned timepieces.

The business has been in the family since the 1930s.

When I was 16, my mother and father bought the store from my great uncle.

And my dad suggested that after school, I should come down to the store and work for a few hours each day and then work on Saturday, and I could earn some money.

And I said, well, what am I here to do?

And he said, well, Tom, I'll show you how to fix.

Tom was my uncle will show you how to fix clocks See, it's just it's all gummed up.

See, that just won't move freely like it's supposed to.

So it's got very old oil in it.

So what we're going to do is take it apart and clean and oil it, and then it'll work like new.

First, let's take the dial off.

The mechanically inclined, Groening who's now 75, built a go cart when he was a kid.

He grew his watchmaking skills on the job, learning from his uncle.

Dick says he was a great teacher, and by attending the Bulova Watch school, where he got his license.

From.

Now we can take the winding wheel off.

There we go.

You know, I'm happy to do it.

Then you can take this jewel.

I just like getting something that's broke and making it work for you.

Especially if it's a 120, 30 years old.

That's a lot of fun.

Like this right here.

This is an absolutely beautiful pocket watch.

It's an LG from about 100 years ago, but it's top of the line.

It's even got gold gears.

This is back when we made watches in the world here in America.

And the Swiss copied us.

This is one of them.

And it needs needs your oil change basically.

So I'm going to service that.

And, the customer will be overjoyed.

So it works.

Dick takes us inside the Elgin.

The gears are in solid gold minutes today and all jewel settings are solid gold.

It's even got a jeweled mainspring barrel.

It's a 23 jewel 12 size.

Elgin adjusted to five positions.

Like positions are like this, this, this, this, this.

And it'll keep the same time in all those positions.

It needs cleaning though.

It's all gummed up manually That little jewel right there.

At one time, his shop will have 200 to 300 watches and 100 clocks in for repair.

Look.

That won't stand you.

Why are you put it in and it sits there.

Yeah.

That's right.

But then we just go like this.

Oh, and this doesn't screw off.

It just pops off.

Oh, right.

Dick's son in law, Jeff Roscoe, and the shop's mascot, Red, help out!

“Thats the Mascot” Jeff just retired last August from a career in the Navy.

His kids call him the fixer of things.

I I'll do some of the lower end stuff.

I can replace movements or crystals, capacitors and some of the, the newer watches as well as just, you know, batteries or some of the simpler repairs so that he can focus on the more complex and complicated, the pocket watches and the, the bigger stuff, the clocks.

Jeff takes us on a tour of a quartz watch.

So unlike the one that he showed you over there in that pocket watch, that keeps time because the springs stay wound and then it slowly moves the gears and it takes the second hand a lot of the quartz movements.

While all of the course movements have a battery, and the battery puts electrical signal into that quartz, and that little crystal and that crystal vibrates, and then the computer inside of here takes and it moves and it ticks based on the number of vibrations in that crystal.

So this would be a quartz movement run by a battery, as opposed to the one that he showed you before.

That's run by springs.

To take care of your watch.

Dick suggests you get a service, essentially a cleaning and oil change.

In this age of smartphones and smart watches, Dick disputes the notion that people aren't wearing traditional watches.

Couple years ago was the number one watch sales year there ever was.

Young people are buying, for little like, jewelry.

I get just as many young people in here now.

Not with antique clocks and stuff, but with watches.

I get just as many young people in here as I do old people.

So they're not disappearing.

Once you get a watch on your wrist, you realize there's ways here to go like that.

And pull the phone out.

Dick says hes now the only watchmaker in the Tri-Cities.

He says there were probably a dozen back in the 70s.

His watch making a career to get into?

If you like mechanics, if you like working on stuff, it's inside.

It's warm, it's air conditioned.

You don't get all greasy.

It's a nice job.

You get to sit down on the job most of the day.

Its a nice clean job, if you like mechanics.

What it basically is, is miniature mechanics.

different tweezers for different jobs.

There.

There.

There.