Popping into a hardware store won’t do when Brittany Nicole Cox needs parts or tools. She’s an antiquarian horologist, trained to conserve and restore historic clocks and the clockwork showpieces called automatons (1 and 8, below). “I work on objects created before mass production, before the standardization of things like screw threading,” Cox explains. So when she needs to replace a part in a delicate mechanism that may have sat frozen for a century, she builds it in her Seattle workshop, often using tools that also are antiques. “There’s such craft and art in them,” she says.
To conserve and restore historic clocks and the clockwork showpieces called automatons—an example is top left in this photo—antiquarian horologist Brittany Nicole Cox relies on some specialized tools that themselves are antiques.
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