Building a Watch From Scratch In Brooklyn

Have you ever considered what it would take to start a microbrand? I was deep in an instagram doom scroll when a field watch I’d yet to see abruptly stopped my thumb. “I love this watch. My good friend made this by hand and it’s incredible. He makes them in Brooklyn from scratch. Check out his work” my buddy Greg’s caption read. I was digitally introduced to Giles Clement. 

Raised in the Catskills, he was always a tinkerer. It probably started with him putting old lawnmower engines on wheels as a makeshift go-kart, but he has always had the gift of creating something from nothing. 

A decade ago he stumbled upon a massive petzval lens at a thrift shop outside Chicago. This launched a years-long endeavor of building his own large format camera and teaching himself wet plate photography. Before he knew it, he was in a tent at a music festival in Rhode Island taking a portrait of Kris Kristofferson with a giant camera made of plywood and trash bags. The rest is history. 

Photo by Jonah Markowitz

He went on to have a successful photography career, capturing portraits of folks like Nick Offerman, Fiona Apple, Channing Tatum, Questlove, Roger Waters, Elvis Costello and various other high profile figures, as well as several fine art series. 

Suddenly in 2020, like many others in the film and photography industry (myself included), work disappeared and he found himself on a forced hiatus. Never one to have idle hands, he began repairing watches. Ebay offered access to cheap lots of watchmaking tools and he spent hundreds of hours tinkering with old Gruens and Hamiltons, repairing older cheaper models while searching for something he would eventually want to wear himself. 

As he got deeper and deeper into the hobby, his workspace had bloated significantly but he still hadn’t repaired a watch that he actually wanted to wear himself. An idea formed that he should just build his own, taking design elements from the countless abused watches he’s been restoring over the early days of social distancing. 

This idea was the inception of a now-years-long project that has birthed two editions of field watches, a bespoke chronograph flying on the wrist of an astronaut on the ISS, and a newly  released GMT. 

I emailed Giles last December letting him know I was an avid watch collector and filmmaker interested in hearing more about his watchmaking, and possibly filming his operations for a short film. Fortunately he agreed and I’ve spent the last year in and out of his shops, observing his skills as a watchmaker grow along with the construction of an entire suite of machines custom-made to suit his unique needs. 

Photo by Jonah Markowitz

The basement smells as a Brooklyn basement should, steel shavings and microscopic glass beads from the sand blaster crunch underfoot. The ceiling is too low and there are lights rigged from pipes that would otherwise be head injury hazards. A monolithic, 6 ft tall CNC machine is milling a case, foggy acrylic panels distorting our sight from the violence involved in carving shapes out of solid steel. The smaller CNC’s high pitched buzz carves tiny indices out of a brass dial blank, a mist of cooling fluid diffusing into the air behind me. Giles is polishing a case-blank on the “spinmaster 3000”, another machine he’s built from a stock servo and more plywood he found on the street. Monitors flicker with status updates on the various milling processes and Giles darts across to another workbench, agitating a fluid immersed dial that is gradually darkening with precipitate. It’s loud, chaotic and wonderful to observe. None of this screams “elegant” but out of each station something refined and beautiful emerges. 

He is in the late stages of producing the final parts for the remaining 1st edition field watches. A deafening air compressor kicks on as he bead-blasts a finished steel case in a rubbermaid tub with glove holes cut into it. The micro CNC has finished engraving the brass dial and is now cutting a set of second hands that he’ll be airbrushing a vibrant red later this evening. He is indeed a one man factory. 

“Initially when I started the project, I figured I could make a case with a Lathe and just turn it manually out of steel. I ordered a blank case cut out with a waterjet and put that in the manual lathe which worked technically, but it just wasn’t coming out as precise as I wanted. Then I was trying to get someone who could laser cut the hands and dials I’d designed. I was just making a watch for myself, and when you’re working on a limited scale with just a few parts, nobody’s going to want to fuck with that. It doesn’t make sense (for them) to make three hands on a laser cutter. So outsourcing stuff was a limitation.” 

Photo by Jonah Markowitz

Since he was having limited success with the lathe-turned cases, he first built the micro CNC to mill out the dials and hands to avoid the cost of having a 3rd party laser cut those. That was incredibly successful and it snowballed into the construction of a larger 3-axis monster I hear humming two floors down in the basement. It is made of steel he found on an abandoned railtrack, plywood and acrylic panels he found on the sidewalk and the actual drill housing is an old forklift wheel he salvaged. On top of constructing this behemoth, he also custom coded its operating system in Linux while teaching himself CAD so he could translate his designs into a three dimensional language the mill could understand. Now he can cut carbon copy cases over and over again in steel or titanium. 

After a bit of online browsing, the cheapest comparable factory made equivalent I could find was tens of thousands of dollars. Giles built, wired, coded and has successfully made watches on machines he constructed alone for a fraction of that. It may not look like a Swiss factory in the basement, but the parts finishing he’s achieving with these machines is on par if not exceeding most microbrands I’ve handled. 

Photo by Jonah Markowitz

His assembly area on the 2nd floor is much more peaceful and organized. I observe him for hours hunched over a microscope, fitting the dial and hands onto a Sellita SW300 Automatic movement before meticulously double and triple checking the waterproof gasket on the caseback. A printed-out sign hovering over this workspace proclaims “Slow the Fuck Down.” Watch assembly pacing is a very different beast than parts manufacturing and almost hypnotic compared to the frenetic energy in the basement. 

As I departed well after dark from our last day of filming, he was head-down at the assembly station, finishing up the final field watch from his first collection. This 9 of 9 run of his first ever watch sold out quickly and he has lofty ambitions for his next few pieces.  

Photo by Jonah Markowitz

This brings us to his most ambitious project to date. We meet again seven months later and he’s moved out of the basement to a bright and spacious workshop a stone’s throw from the Brooklyn Army Terminal. He’s decided to explore using a new case material and I find him head down at the microscope assembling a titanium chronograph that is headed to space in 2025. Through yet another instagram connection, Giles had helped an amateur photographer get her feet wet with large format photography back in his photo days. She followed his watchmaking endeavor via social media and eventually reached out again about buying one of his first edition field watches. Knowing her profession, Giles decided to pitch something even more ambitious. She is an Astronaut and for the past year they have been collaborating on the design of the titanium “orbital chronograph.” 

I was shipped off to space camp one summer as a pre-teen and that sparked a lifelong interest in NASA’s Apollo program and continues in the burgeoning private aerospace industry. Omega reigned supreme in the Apollo era so naturally this collided with my watch collecting and I spent years trolling ebay and for-sale forums in search of a pre-moon Speedmaster (I finally landed a 145.012). Giles and I understand the idea that sending a watch to space instills some sort of mystical power into it. The romance of the success of NASA’s greatest accomplishment being tied to a precision mechanical timing device was not just Omega’s most ingenious ad campaign ever, but also has just enough truth to keep that romance alive. Giles doesn’t have an entire factory of Swiss watchmakers to rely on. However, he now has all the machines he needs to make a chronograph and a willing collaborator in this astronaut who believes in that same mythology. 

They started from the case inward and have spent the last year designing, fabricating and assembling the Orbital Chronograph that will leave the planet later in 2025. He started by milling several dummy cases in aluminum (much cheaper than the final model’s titanium) with different lug tapers so he could ensure the case fit comfortably on her wrist. From there he identified her specific needs for the watch such as a high visibility dial and internal weight reduction. They’ve been slowly iterating for the last 6 months. As is always the case with Giles, he found himself frustrated with some of the off the shelf parts he could order from Switzerland and designed/fabricated many just for this watch. He made 7 parts for his first watch (case, dial, hands, movement holder and caseback). For this chronograph he made 30, including the pushers and a unique screwdown crown. Designed around an ETA 7753 and pressure tested to 100m, it would soon be flying through space at 17,500 miles per hour.

Having documented Giles for the last year I have a new appreciation not just for watch making but the watches themselves. I’ve been collecting for over 20 years and as the older watch enthusiasts among us will know, tastes and interests change over time. As I’ve been able to afford “nicer” watches and handle some precious metal and jewel encrusted masterpieces, it’s been easy to forget why I first fell in love. They are, in their basic form, tools. I loved the different complications that made them useful for highly specific jobs. The helium escape valve I’d never have a legitimate use for, but I appreciated how qualified that watch is for saturation diving. I barely know how to read a tachymeter but I like to think I could calculate the average speed of a McLaren around the Monaco circuit if I wanted to. I’ve used a pulsometer maybe twice. But observing Giles not only design this functional object of beauty, but witnessing the case emerge from a block of characterless titanium, butane flames bluing an hour hand, hearing the first click of a chronograph pusher engaging successfully, smelling the acetone thinning the paint for a second hand. I’m in awe of what he’s accomplished alone. Not just in the final product, but the constant chaos of his unique machinery used in its creation. As he says himself, “I have trouble kind of accepting that what I’m doing is good enough a lot of times. I think some of that is accepting that I am making a watch in a basement, not an airtight swiss factory. But the purpose in a project can be that you enjoy and get fulfillment out of creating something. I get a kick out of making things myself. I’m still having fun with it. I still love going down and making parts. I’m still enjoying the process.” 

Photo by Jonah Markowitz

When I departed his workshop most recently he was experimenting with padprinting the dial of his recently announced GMT model, featuring the first white dial he’s made. A case for a second edition field watch is emerging from a titanium cube in the CNC. Notes outlining how he’ll approach injection molding his own straps are up on his computer. I think it’s safe to say that he’s no longer just a hobbyist. Clement Design Studio

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