Set your clock by the work of these restoration volunteers

Given the choice between running a factory that builds modular homes and working on the mechanisms of a clock, Dobert Owsley prefers the timepiece.

“The clocks are a lot less pressure,” he said. “When you’re running 14 floors and you’ve got 600 employees and materials don’t come for some reason, you can be in bad shape.”

About 10 years ago, he retired as a housing industry plant manager in Pennsylvania, and found an interest in clocks. He’s been repairing them ever since and still has a small repair shop in his garage.

 “It’s a big problem-solving thinfg repairing clocks,” he said. “And, it’s very relaxing. Plus the really neat thing is the customer here. I meet all kinds of folks, and they all have a cuckoo clock in their attic, or a grandfather clock, and there are a lot of presentation clocks – men who retired from industry.”

But his favorite clock is the 1911 Seth Thomas Clock from the New Bern City Hall tower, which he and a group of volunteers have been restoring since 2007.

They will reach a milestone this Monday morning, when their 2,800-pound prize work is moved from its worksite at the Broad Street fire station to its permanent home inside the great hall of the new $60 million N.C. History and Education Center on the South Front Street waterfront.

Owsley and other clock enthusiasts are from the regional chapter of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors.

“It’s in the spirit of the 300^th that we are doing all of this,” Owsley said. “It’s been a real community project and a lot of other people have helped.”

He estimates the clockwork group has put in more than 1,200 volunteer hours  on restoration at the Fireman’s Museum and later at the fire station.

The total money spent is about $1,100, he said, which included $500 from the Fireman’s Museum through efforts by Alderman Sabrina Bengel.

City records show the Seth Thomas clock was built and installed in 1911. It operated inside the New Bern Post Office and Customs tower from 1911 to 1999.

The clock was decommissioned in 1999 because of ongoing mechanical problems and long repair times. An electrical/digital system now controls the clock faces and bell.

The four-sided City Hall clock continues to tick, having been run by electric-driven motors since 1999.

The restoration volunteers include Owsley, Michael Hattem, Glenn Irving, Fred Swartout, Kenneth Johnston, Robert Weeks, Sid Weiner, Francis Murphy, Edward Grey and Yvonne Johnston.

Owsley is an Indiana native, who said he was busy “being just a country kid, just a regular kid,” and working a paper route growing up. After graduating from high school in 1962, he went to Indiana University for a few years, and then completed his degree in business management over the next 15 years in night school. Along the way, he was in the Army and served in Vietnam.

Six years ago, he and his wife Sue moved to New Bern from Pennsylvania, where he had taken up working on clocks as a hobby.

She’s a school nurse in Pamlico County and he worked for several years as a cabinet maker at Hatteras Yachts. He was fascinated by the New Bern tower clock and received permission to climb inside the tower and see it.

That’s when he found out it had been out of service since 1999, with a motor-driven replacement powering the four-dials on the tower.

“About that time we formed the chapter of the clock group and that’s how it got started — curiosity and an interest in clocks,” he said.

The volunteers spent two weekends dismantling and removing the clock from high in the city hall tower. Buckets of pieces were lowered by hand to the main floor through the building's winding staircase, and ropes and pulleys handled larger pieces, with heavy lifting by five city employees.

Working a few hours each Saturday, the volunteers diagnosed the clock’s needs, repainted it with the original green and black colors, cleaned it, reworked motors and replaced and rebuilt gear boxes and linkage, and fashioned a new temporary dial.

The permanent cast iron clock pendulum will be more than eight feet long, and weigh 325 pounds. A shorter one was installed for tests and the clock was up and running by mid-summer of 2009.

In its permanent home, it will be the first thing visitors see when they enter and look up. There will be an inside three-foot dial, and also a metal outside clock face. The goals is to have the dials completed by July in time for the fall opening of the history center.

Owsley said he and none of the volunteers are natives of New Bern, but they are proud to aid the heritage of their adopted home.

“A lot of us are like myself, you’ve always been busy someplace else doing things, and you reach a point where you say ‘I want to do something for the community,’” he said. “That’s where it comes from. And, the folks I’ve worked with on this, they just love clocks.”

It will be a lasting gift.

“It will be running there for a long, long time,” he said. “It’s all in the spirit of the celebration. All the nice things — the get-togethers and picnics will all go away. But the clock will still be there.”

Charlie Hall can be reached at 252-635-5667 or chall@freedomenc.com.