A few dozen employees assemble the clocks in a warehouse in Berkeley. Now, Timeworks’ cheapest clocks sit on store shelves for $8.95. His most expensive time-telling invention sold for $9,000. Before that, most of Kowalski’s creative clocks were ticking away for about $1,000 apiece. Timeworks was born in 1995 when Kowalski’s brother suggested selling cheaper clocks to average buyers. But for years, he has spent most of his time in the shop developing products for his business, Timeworks Inc. Kowalski said he wishes he had more time to assemble strange clocks. “Someday I’ll make a clock out of it for some crazy person.” “This is an old autoclave,” he said, pointing to an outdated medical machine for sterilizing equipment. Scientific devices, military parts and European antiques lay on the ground and on shelves alongside objects that Kowalski couldn’t even identify. “This is my private, scientist-sort of workshop,” he said. Others were taller than the man who crafted them. But building one-of-a-kind clocks became Kowalski’s career and lifelong craft.Ī walk around his shop revealed some clocks that fit in the palm of Kowalski’s hand. Called it Kowalski Clockworks: Clocks Like You’ve Never Seen Before.” “And this friend of mine bought it for 500 bucks. “I came home and I put them together and made a clock, and it was beautiful,” Kowalski said. He began his hobby with a trip to a flea market in the spring of 1992, where he bought a box of clock parts. Kowalski, a 54-year-old clockmaker from Point Richmond who designed the Giants clock that rests in San Francisco’s ballpark, creates timepieces out of found objects. There was a violin, a pistol, a cask, motors, lamps, a rotisserie part and a ration tin from World War II – all made into clocks. Stretching over gadgets to flip on the light, he illuminated his treasures. On a recent afternoon, Steve Kowalski unlocked the oversized wooden doors to his Point Richmond shop and maneuvered through a room littered with what appeared to be junk.
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