Lost in the fibers of the shag rug on Abby Stevens’s living room floor are the secret mechanisms of time: tiny slivers of steel, brass gears you could balance on a pinhead, jewels the size of a speck of dust. To a vacuum cleaner, eventually, they’ll register as little more than lint or crumbs, but, to Stevens, such detritus is laden with meaning and function. Unless every minuscule component is present, each set perfectly in its place behind the watch-face, time’s arrow cannot march on.
“It’s a self-contained universe,” Stevens said. “It’s like an ecosystem where truly nothing can be fucked up. Like, it’s so precise.”
Watch repair is strictly recreational for Stevens, a computational data scientist. It’s the latest in a long line of increasingly refined miniature hobbies she has undertaken.
What began with a single DIY miniature house-building kit, a gift from her mother in 2018, has grown into a whole miniature neighborhood, all but one part of which she’s given as gifts to friends. Next came her tiny crochet projects, including a dainty baby mobile she made for a friend’s newborn. From there, she entered her “Susan Alexandra phase,” turning her excellent dexterity to beading, weaving delicate charms to hang off beaded bracelets inspired by the viral New York brand.
Then she “graduated” to silver clay, which she formed and blowtorched into tiny charms before stringing them into a necklace, which she also gifted to a friend. “That was probably my most sophisticated hobby. Well, until now.”
Now, it’s all about the watches. Stevens has spent months tucked in a sunny corner of her Cole Valley apartment, fiddling, repairing, constructing and deconstructing movements of varying sizes.
Ironically, Stevens has never timed exactly how long it takes her to take apart a watch and put it back together. She estimates that it takes her about 20 minutes. When I visited her work station, the sun rose about an hour’s worth while she showed me how time works.
First, using a vice the size of a ring box, she stabilized a special movement made for repair practice. “This is like pocket watch-sized,” she estimated. “I would never wear a watch this big.” (On her first foray into watch repair, she started with a women’s watch, which is about half of the size of a men’s. “This one is much more forgiving,” she said of the practice watch.)
Next, she removed the hands, before unscrewing a series of bridges, or steel plates that cover the many gears, springs, and pinions that do the mechanical labor. From there, she pried up even more elements, increasingly infinitesimal and securely poised, doing her best not to launch any more into the rug beneath her.
Soon enough she was in a flow state, and our interview took a backseat. Carefully using golf pencil-sized screwdrivers and fine-tipped tweezers, I watched as she handled the hundreds of gleaming metal bits strewn across her vintage writing desk and that she has organized in craft boxes, plastic baggies, and, at the recommendation of the online watch repair forums she frequents, clean petri dishes.
The sheer amount of components creates constraints for new hobbyists looking for community. (The watch repair community, Stevens noted, is very different from watch enthusiast groups, like local clubs 49Crowns or Watch The Bay.) “I do think because you need so much equipment, I don’t know what a meetup would look like,” Stevens said from behind magnifying goggles as her tweezers guided a glinting steel gear — “the escape wheel,” she mumbled — out of a precision-cut divot in the movement.
Mostly, Stevens has learned about watch repair on YouTube. She buys cheap watches for repair on eBay. She’s been looking for local pawn shops to source equipment, but so far their inventory is out of her budget. “If you look up ‘SF best pawn shops,’ you’re buying Rolexes. It’s serious business.”
For Stevens, the most serious her horological business will get is gifting something hand-repaired to a loved one. “I’m not interested in an Etsy store. I’m not trying to do an Instagram. That’s not ever how I think about crafting.”
In the social media age, when any unmonetized hobby appears underactualized, there is a purity to Stevens’s approach, especially considering the power of the device: the wristwatch is one of the most influential pieces of technology ever constructed. Like the sundial and the wall clock before it, a wristwatch sliced ancient celestial rhythms into tidy units, but this device placed the record on your arm. It is the original personal tech, rule-bound and elegant. Mechanical watches are even embedded with rubies, not for adornment, but to deliver the precise degree of friction to allow the force of a few winds to last for days. Made functional with precious jewels, a watch’s value is not speculative or mimetic. To deconstruct a mechanical watch is to deconstruct a fundamental gestalt of the world. It is, simply put, time realized.
The phone, of course, contains time now. Our watches, alarm clocks, and timers are all flat. For many of us, it’s easy to forget how different the forms and functions of each time-telling device once were, but Stevens is a systems thinker; she is always cognizant of the underlying mechanisms around us. She has a Ph.D. in statistics and worked remotely as a data scientist for Argonne National Laboratories until beginning a sabbatical earlier this year. She understands intuitively how once-elegant designs can become degraded.
As AI accelerates past levels of human understanding, Stevens’s latest tiny hobby is a commitment to slow, effortful timekeeping. “AI is a predictive model. Probabilistic predictive modeling is what I’ve been doing my whole career, and I think there are many ways in which AI has bastardized what I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about,” Stevens said.
“We used to try to build systems carefully and precisely. We used to try to honor physics and mechanics that mattered. Now we have these monsters that have consumed everything, and they don't care about this,” she said, gesturing to the now-deconstructed movement on the desk. As other San Franciscans her age and with similar backgrounds are tinkering to unleash fully abstracted systems in the name of “innovation,” Stevens is using her considerable patience and intelligence to repair logical and physics-dependent systems that were, in their time, the height of innovation.
“We really take time for granted,” Stevens said, surveying her work station. “To get a clock, we fucking had to make this!”
“I don’t believe we could do this anymore. I don’t know if the pursuit of human knowledge would arrive at a clock anymore, and that’s sad.” She took a breath. “So much of this hobby, I know, is just me trying to fight against the reality that I’ll inevitably have to work in AI.”
