Have a troubled timepiece? Call the Down East clock doc Harrington man’s mechanical mastery an increasingly rare skill

HARRINGTON – Robert Coffin of Harrington, who will celebrate his 90th birthday this month, drives throughout eastern Washington County to make house calls because his antique patients often are too fragile or unwieldy to be brought to him. With a steady hand and a sharp eye, he nurses the old works to better health, adjusting springs and cogs, using his special oil to loosen up tired joints.

Just like a tuneup on a car, he says, an antique clock needs maintenance on a yearly basis.

“I do it for fun,” Coffin openly admits, “but I’ve got to eat, too.” Like any master artisan, his house calls are not inexpensive. He says that $70 is a fair estimate of an average call.

Not many houses now harbor the regular tick, tick, tick of a clock that runs on wheels, cogs and springs, and not many people know the musical strike of a metal chime on the hour or half hour. If an old grandfather clock or ship’s clock, perhaps a family heirloom, stops functioning or loses time, it may be hard to find anyone who knows how to repair it.

Coffin is devoted to bringing life back to those relics of days gone by, and his home and workshop are filled with dozens of aged timepieces waiting to be wound.

“I still have the first clock I fixed when I was a kid in grammar school,” says Robert Coffin. “I found it in a pile of things someone was throwing out, took it apart and got it running.”

That childhood success led to a lifetime interest.

Coffin’s workshop, a 10-by-15-foot room above his garage, is lined with shelves and drawers holding hundreds of components that wait for his skilled hands to put them in aged timepieces. The walls are lined with some of his patients – Tambour clocks, grandfather clocks, cottage, steeple, gingerbread, schoolhouse clocks, calendar and pillar and scroll clocks, as well as antique watches.

A couple of the antique clocks were left with him for repairs years ago by people who never returned once the work was done. Coffin says he could sell them, but keeps them just in case the owners decide to come back.

Coffin’s fascination with “small things,” as he puts it, led him to study engineering at the University of Maine in Orono in the late 1930s. With an interruption to study at Boston’s Wentworth Institute in manual arts and the machinist trade, he briefly went to work for Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut, but was drafted into the Army during World War II. When he returned from Europe, he went back to UM to get his degree on the recommendation of P&W. With his engineering degree, though, the aircraft manufacturer then told him he was overqualified to be a machinist.

He laughs at the paradox, because the turn of events led him to a job at the Torrington Co. in Connecticut. When Ingersol-Rand bought the maker of bearings and sewing machine needles in the 1960s, he eventually worked his way up to overseeing the design and construction of a $10 million factory in Portugal.

When the Portugal opportunity arose, Coffin’s first wife of 17 years, Antoinette St. Pierre of Van Buren, had died of leukemia, but he took his son and two daughters with his current wife, Eleanor, with him. While there, he continued his childhood interest by buying an array of clocks.

His son, Charlie, an engineer working for a corporation that makes bearings and who also repairs clocks in California, remembers going to flea markets in Europe where American clocks were much more reasonably priced than fine European ones such as the 1700s-vintage Austrian clock Coffin still prizes today.

Coffin explained that even 200 years ago, clocks from the United States were made in assembly-line style, while those made in Europe were handcrafted individually, making them far more expensive to own.

Once again returning to the U.S. in 1974, Coffin set up shop with all the treasures he had acquired overseas. A partner in the Harrington antiques business of Ramsdel, Rumble & Coffin until he closed it after 20 years, Coffin betrays a trace of dismay when he mentions that he was considered “from away,” even though he had been born here and his grandfather had been a ship’s captain and shipbuilder in the town at the turn of the 20th century.

So he may be surprised at his 90th birthday party on Saturday, June 14, where his daughter Nancy Anderson of Camden says she expects dozens of well-wishers. Coffin, with a sparkle in his eye, says he knows nothing of such plans.

Anderson recalls her childhood in Connecticut, when cousins would visit for the night and “had a hard time getting any sleep because the dozen or so clocks ticked and chimed all night.

“Of course, I was used to it,” she adds.

Today, as he regularly takes calls from as far away as California for advice on repairing old clocks, Coffin also receives packages of “works” that need specialized manipulation, and he artfully fashions metal pieces in his workshop to get them running. His local jobs come by word of mouth or referrals from clock repairman Alexander Phillips in Bar Harbor, but Coffin’s business has no formal name or listing in the Yellow Pages.

He has been a member of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors since 1964, one of the organization’s longest memberships.

On rare occasions, Coffin doctors wooden works for early American chronometers, explaining that clockmakers here used wood until the mid-1800s because there were no metal casting facilities. He also does inlay work on the clock cases. He is proud to show one such wooden-works clock from Connecticut, which was the center of the young clockmaking industry in the United States.

Still, Coffin’s skill in repairing aged clocks is his greatest pleasure. As time passes, he wistfully longs for an apprentice who can learn his vast store of knowledge so that it will not be lost.

Coffin’s son, Charlie, and two of Coffin’s seven grandchildren are engineers – one even works at Pratt & Whitney – but none of them share the patriarch’s intense interest in the tiny workings of his beloved timepieces.

Even though his love is clocks, Coffin’s talents are not limited to them. His house displays several examples of the fine wooden furniture he has made in the past 30 years.

One of his more recent accomplishments is a collection of miniature tools and utensils the size of a fingernail, perfectly functional for anyone who is 6 inches tall.

Coffin’s other daughter, Roberta Montagna of North Haven, Conn., sums up her father in the simplest terms: “He can repair and fix anything.”