He crafts and repairs hundreds of clocks a year at his Waukesha shop.
“There are a lot of guys that fix and repair clocks, but not a lot of them make clocks.” Bill Galinksy of Duplainville Clock Co. in Waukesha makes a lot of clocks – from heavy stainless-steel towers to ornate hand-carved cuckoos. diy clock parts
The 65-year-old also repairs well over 300 clocks a year, but it’s his own elaborate creations that have earned him accolades over the years for engineering and case design.
His process is deceivingly simple: he thinks of a design, and then he makes it. “I do all the engineering in my head,” he says. It’s that kind of expertise, paired with acute patience, that allows him to spend hundreds of hours crafting feats like the Black Forest Wisconsin – a 1,000-pound grandfather cuckoo with a glockenspiel – without putting pen to paper.
His obsession started young. At 9 years old, Galinsky would take piano lessons next door to a clock repair shop in Milwaukee. “I was always looking in the window and fascinated with it,” he says. “One day, the old guys watched me standing out in the rain waiting for dad, so they told me to come on in.” That’s where he learned to glue cuckoo clock parts together.
Galinsky sold his first line of clocks at 12 and filed his first tax returns as a clock maker at 16. “But did I look at it as a business? No,” he says. He saw it as a fun hobby that happened to pay money. But out of it a business grew anyway.
Between repairing and creating clocks, Galinsky finds pluses and minuses in both. He started crafting his own clocks because “I didn’t want to fix anybody else’s junk,” he says. Repairing not only means fixing what’s broken but correcting previous tinkerers’ mistakes. But he also believes repairing clocks that sentimental value for others is “a lot more rewarding than somebody critiquing your work that has never built a clock before.”
When creating, he tries to throw something different into the equation. “The (clockmaking) science was all scienced out years before me,” he says. “I take my physics training, and I take my chemistry, architectural, and engineering training, and I put it all into one and I come up with different things to do.” Like a clock that generates its own electricity, or the art-deco stainless-steel tower – his only design he’s written down.
What’s he making now? Among many other things, wall clocks with animated farms on the inside – “because that’s what we are in Wisconsin.”
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