By Christine Heiser
Staff Writer

Ken Howell of Goffstown cuts the largest gear for his wooden clock design, shown completed below. The clock mechanism is almost entirely made of wood – it contains no purchased works. He’s made eight clocks, each one unique, spending hours of time to get them to keep perfect time. (Christine Heiser Photos)

Ken Howell is a clock-watcher in the worst way. He once spent more than an hour standing in front of a large wooden clock at L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine, trying to determine how the thing worked.

“I still haven’t figured it out,” the Goffstown resident said, in a tone that makes you believe he’s not giving up anytime soon.

The American Airlines pilot spends hours of his downtime working with time. He builds wooden clocks. It’s a painstaking business – he spends about four or five hours a day over two weeks just to cut out the parts.

“The gear teeth take one minute each to cut, and there are 90 on the larger gear,” he said.

He uses plywood to make the gears for the timekeeper he designed himself – usually Baltic birch or walnut – as plywood isn’t as prone to changes due to humidity as solid wood is. And in keeping with a natural theme, for the weight that drives the gears, he chooses a rock, slightly larger than a bar of soap, from the ones he picks up while walking on the beach. He uses templates cut from a frozen pizza box to carefully mark the shapes on the wood for cutting.

But the attention to detail doesn’t stop with the band saw. After assembling the clock, Howell hangs it on a wall in his basement workshop – and watches it keep time. When it gets out of whack or stops, he has to track down exactly which part isn’t w o r k i n g the right way. He might have to lightly file down a single gear tooth, or adjust a peg, but he doesn’t mind. He revels in the search, and feels satisfaction when he solves the problem.

How the clock keeps time, he explains, is simply a matter of gears cut in ratios to each other so that they turn the big hand around the face every 60 minutes.

Then he stops to show off the beauty part.

American Airlines pilot Ken Howell uses these carefully cut wooden parts, and carefully chosen beach rocks, to assemble his custom clock. One of the clocks is for sale in the Cordwainer Gallery in Bedford. (Christine Heiser Photo)

The escapement.

“It’s the heart and soul of any pendulum clock,” he said.

The escapement is the part of the mechanism that makes the clock tick – literally. The sound you hear is the escapement catching a peg on a wheel and then releasing it in a perfectly smooth, timed movement. Escapements come in many varieties, but they fall into two categories. The rebound escapement, which his prototype clock uses, turns the wheel back slightly, then moves it forward. With the other type, the deadbeat escapement, the wheel moves forward in a sort of dropping motion, which causes less wear and tear on the part. Most clocks today use the deadbeat, he said, and his next design will use that type. But in general, clock movements haven’t changed much in centuries. In fact, the escapement on his current clock was inspired by some of Galileo’s drawings that Howell saw in a book.

His own inspiration began years ago. Howell, 44, has been a woodworker since he was in junior high in Denver, building radio-controlled airplanes out of wood. After he moved with his wife, Diane, to Goffstown in 1998, he noticed a big wooden clock at the Cordwainer Gallery in Bedford, and got hooked on the idea of building his own.

He began in 1999, and since that time, has only made eight clocks, five of his design and three of another, with a frame surrounding the gears, that he made from plans he bought. Most of them he’s given away to relatives, but one hangs for sale in the Cordwainer Gallery, where it all began for him.

He hasn’t been as active making the clocks for the last few years because of a new interest – his son, Jake, now 2.

“The toddler cuts into the clockmaking time, “ he said.

Besides, right now he’s busy making Jake a set of wooden building blocks, 200 to be exact. And it’s not as simple as it sounds.

“Each one has to be cut perfectly so they’ll stack correctly,” he said. “They’re a nightmare.”

But he’ll keep his hand in the timekeeping business. It’s a break from his job piloting 737s for American.

“The main part of flying is doing what other people tell you to do. Climb to 30,000 feet, make a left turn,” he said. But he gets to do his own thing in the workshop.

And Howell has even more of his own thing planned for the future.

“I’ve got some crazy ideas running around in my head,” he said. They include making a clock out of cut stone gears.He’s already collecting stone floor tiles for the experiment.

He’d also like to try his hand at building an atmos clock, which needs no winding or batterivariations in temperature keep it running. They’re the kind of mantle clock you see where the mechanism revolves back and forth in a circle parallel to the flat surface the clock is on.

He hopes that the clocks he builds become his legacy. Most likely they will. It’ll just take time.