Watchmaker masters antique craft

Keaton Myrick's KM Independent Watchmaking has a provocative motto - "Fueled By Passion, Governed By Time." It's a slogan Myrick takes to heart every day.

The young watchmaker is creating handcrafted, precision wrist and pocket watches out of his shop at Beacham's Clock Co. Each timepiece is conceived with painstaking attention to detail, melding Old World techniques with modern-age technology.

"I've always had an interest in watches, starting from a young age," he said. "I even had a little Swatch watch collection, then got into collecting vintage watches."

Myrick graduated from Pennsylvania's Littitz Watch Technicum in 2007, a private trade school that accepts twelve students a year from 150 applicants around the United States. It's a new school providing a two-year program in fine watchmaking, earning him an impressive WOSTEP (Watchmakers of Switzerland Training And Education Program) diploma.

"One of the reasons I decided to apply is their emphasis on micromechanics," Myrick explained. "Part of their program is actually making a watch. Littitz is the only school in the United States that practices this tradition."

Myrick went to work for Rolex for a year before makingthe decision to leave and follow his dream of manufacturing his own line back in Central Oregon, where he was raised. He set up an office at Beacham's in fall of 2009 amid the chimes and ticking of hundreds of antique clocks.

The market for artisan watchmaking has blossomed in the past decade, providing opportunities to ambitious startups with the talent and patience to craft a watch entirely by hand.

"Mechanical watches are really popular right now," he said. "You're starting to see a shift toward a more well-made, quality item designed to last for decades if maintained correctly. My product is a manual-wind, highly finished, precision watch made in limited quantities, one at a time. My goal is to craft 12 watches per year. Because I don't have an established name yet, they're priced competitively for this level of quality, between $10,000-$15,000."

Myrickthinks it's interesting for people to learn there's an upper echelon of watchmaking beyond premiere names like Rolex, Omega and Tag Heuer.

"These watches are part of our lives, we wake up in the morning and wind them, and without our care they wouldn't live," he reflected. "The winding of a high-end watch is a very intimate relationship. We like to call it functional art, artwork that needs to do something and do it well. That's my goal I continue to strive for."

For more information visit http://www.kmindependent.com.