The National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC)
                                                    Chapter 154 - Daytona Beach, Florida

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NAWCC Chapter 154 - Daytona Beach, FL

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Coquina Clock Tower
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The Daytona Beach, Chapter 154, of the The National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, Inc. (NAWCC) is
dedicated to preserving the history, art and science of timekeeping (horology). NAWCC is a nonprofit scientific
organization that serves as a unique educational, cultural, and social resource for its membership and the public at large.

Our members include hobbyists, students, educators, casual collectors, clock makers, watch makers, jewelers and
professionals in related retail and manufacturing trades.

 

MEETING SCHEDULE

Third Sunday of each odd numbered month
(January, March, May, July, September and November)
Doors Open at 8:30 AM

NEXT MEETING & MART

  • Sunday, July 20, 2008 [Starting at 8:30 am]

*************************************************

May 2008 Newsletter

(Click on the following link)

NAWCC - Chapter 154 - May 2008 Newsletter.pdf

 

 

Sunday, July 20, 2008
Meeting and Mart Includes:

Presentation: Open Discussion and "Show and Tell"

Any member or guest can bring a horological item and show and tell about it.

 

- SILENT AUCTION - Don't throw it out. Bring any   horological item in any condition. What you consider junk may be someone else's treasure.
    - Mart Table is included (bring your items to sell or trade.)
    - Meeting old friends and making new friends.
    - Full Buffet Lunch.

    - You are welcome to join us!

 

 

***NOTICE***

'NEW' MEETING PLACE

  • (The new meeting place is only 1-1/2 miles north of the former {Country Harvest} meeting location.)
     

  • Please! Bring Any Horological Items You Have to Sell.
    We Have Plenty of  Mart Tables Available.


REGISTRATION AND DUES

Annual Chapter Dues are $8.00 per year


The Mart and Meeting includes a Full Buffet Lunch for $15.00 per person. This includes a Free Mart Table.


Directions to the Whistle Junction
in South Daytona

 

History Captured in Vintage Post Cards with the famous
Coquina Clock Tower in View (Daytona Beach, Florida)

Click here to see a large collection of vintage post cards and recent photographs of the historic Coquina Clock Tower

             

                      

                      

                      

 

Chapter 154's Continuing Effort to Service and Restore Daytona Beach's famous Coquina Clock Tower

March 21, 2008 marked the completion of the 2007/2008 clockworks replacement project when city workers from Daytona Beach started up the new motors and Jim Zeisler and Tom Bransford, Chapter 154 members, put the new hour and minute hands on the four dials of the Coquina Clock Tower. The tower is now telling time once again.

Click here to read a brief paper written by members of Chapter 154 that tells the story of the historic Coquina Clock Tower in Daytona Beach.

 

       

Custom Coquina Clock Tower Post Card
created by NAWCC - Chapter 154 - Daytona Beach, Florida

 

 

Chapter 154 - In the News - May 26, 2008

                                                                        LOCAL NEWS - May 26, 2008 May 26, 2008

Making Good Time

DeLand retiree keeps busy with quirky clockwork             


DELAND -- "Retirement is hell," reads a sign on a shelf in a small outbuilding behind Tom Bransford's 103-year-old home.

News-Journal/PETER BAUER
Tom Bransford tinkers with a Atmos timepiece in his DeLand shop recently. Bransford, a war veteran, is a master clock repairman and spends most of his day tinkering with the old and unique timekeepers.
 

It's a little clock workshop -- crowded with hundreds of chiming, ticking, bim-bamming timekeepers, from cuckoos to grandfather clocks to French imported wall dials -- where Bransford, 77, spends most of his waking hours.

The former career Army pilot and retired supervisor from the Boise Cascade manufacturing company who then taught a vocational clock repair class for 21 years, is most happy there.

His favorites: the Atmos clocks, some worth as much as $40,000.

An Atmos is perpetual -- doesn't need winding, but runs by a hermetically sealed capsule filled with ethyl chloride (gas and liquid) which expands and contracts with temperature change, Bransford explained.

"They shipped one from Anchorage, Alaska, that just came in -- which makes 14 here now to be fixed," he said. "I have six from individuals in New Orleans that were presentation clocks. They were underwater in Katrina. They are government clocks."

 

Did you know?

  Big Ben, the famed bell tower at Britain's House of Parliament, has chimed through freezing winters, fierce storms and World War II bombing raids.

· The neo-gothic clock tower is popularly known as Big Ben, though the name actually refers only to the 13.5 ton bell inside.

· The bell has been silenced for repairs only four times -- in 1934, 1956, 1990 and 2007. However, the clock has briefly stopped by accident over the years due to weather, workmen and even birds.

· The massive bell, currently marking its 150th anniversary, was cast in 1858 and first chimed in July 1859. Soon after, the bell cracked and was rotated so that the hammer wouldn't strike the crack. That same bell, crack and all, remains in use today.

— Compiled by News Researcher Janice Cahill

 

SOURCE: News-Journal research

The West Virginia native, who doesn't need much sleep, said the clock obsession didn't begin when he was serving four years in Germany during a military career that began in 1953. Although he did buy many clocks while living there.

He served in Korea after the major conflict there in the early 1950s and fulfilled two tours in the Vietnam War before retiring in 1973. His last military assignment was at the U.S. Army Training Device Center in Orlando, where he settled after retirement and took a job with Boise Cascade through 1979.

That's where he was involved with fixing one of the world's most remarkable timepieces: England's Big Ben. Boise Cascade was one of only a few companies with a lathe large enough to create an 8-foot and 12-inch-by-12-inch slide replacement part for Big Ben, Bransford said.

"I watched while it was made and put the part on the plane," Bransford said.

While in Orlando, Bransford took a clock-repair class at a vocational school in Winter Park so he could fix some of the clocks he bought in Germany. His interest became so intense that from 1978 through 1999, he taught the class. Then he tried to retire again.

"I came out to DeLand and bought this old house, which nobody had lived in for 26 years," Bransford said. "It was really run down. I said all I wanted to do was fix one clock a day and work on the house."

Instead, he fixes six or seven clocks a day -- seven days a week, and that's only the tip of his mountain of work.

He works on the house occasionally and, in his free moments, Bransford has been working out daily at the YMCA since 2001, when he lost 105 pounds after his quintuple bypass.

"I do take time off to fix the sprinklers, and I have a son, Bruce, who comes out and helps me when I have to take a day off to work in the yard," Bransford said one recent afternoon.

Recently he took time off from his pressing tasks to work with his friends Jim Zeisler, 66, a retired firefighter and clock enthusiast, and Randy Jaye of Orlando, president of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors of Daytona Beach.

The three took part in a public-clock repair project, fixing the timepiece in the coquina tower on the Boardwalk behind the Hilton Hotel.

"The idea was hatched three years ago, and it took this long to come to fruition," Zeisler said.

While Jaye organized the effort and Zeisler rode the lift-bucket to work on the clock, Bransford did much of the behind-the-scene preparation.

"Tom called and sent all kinds of pictures and information on the restorations he was going to do on the clock," said Rosie Karg, a spokeswoman for American Time and Signal. "The system was ancient and now everything is more compact. He had a lot of work to do to refit the new pieces to work within the tower."

But it turns out there's a glitch, which the association members hope to resolve on Tuesday with the help of American Time and Signal.

The clock hands are a fraction too long and must lean out to clear the tower. The tip of the hands on the clock will be shaved slightly to correct the problem.

Fixing the problem will take "patience and a good mechanical mind," he said.

audrey.parente@news-jrnl.com


Video made by the Daytona Beach News-Journal: "Clock Shop" featuring Chapter 154 member: Tom Bransford
Click on the following link:

"Clock Shop" Video - Tom Bransford - Daytona Beach News-Journal - May 2008

 

 

 

 

Chapter 154 - In the News - April 14, 2008

News-Journal/Nigel Cook

Hobbyist Jim Zeisler of Daytona Beach, left, and expert clockmaker Tom Bransford of Deland hold replacement hands for the clock tower on the Boardwalk. The hands are just a bit too long and Bransford is working on the problem.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saving the sands of time


"Retirement is hell," reads a sign in a small home business run by a spunky DeLand retiree. One might say Tom Bransford has too much time on his hands; but not for a lack of something to do. Just the opposite. The 77-year old former career Army pilot who also retired from the Boise Cascade manufacturing company, and then taught a vocational clock repair class for 21 years - fixes six or seven clocks a day. Seven days a week. "I do take time off to fix the sprinklers, and I have a son, Bruce, who comes out and helps me when I have to take a day off to work in the yard," Bransford said during an interview in the clock-crowded shop behind his historic 103-year old house -- also an on-going fixer-upper project in his life.

In his free moments, Bransford has been working out at the YMCA since 2001, when he lost 105 pounds after his quintuple bypass.

The West Virginia native, who doesn't need much sleep, said the clock obsession didn't begin when he was serving four years in Germany during a military career that began in 1953. Although he did buy many clocks while over there. He served in Korea after the major conflict there in the early 1950s and fulfilled two tours in the Vietnam War before retiring in 1973. His last military assignment was at the U.S. Army Training Device Center in Orlando, where he settled after retirement and took a job with Boise Cascade through 1979. While in Orlando, Bransford took a clock-repair class at a vocational school in Winter Park so he could fix some of the clocks he bought in Germany. His interest became so intense that from 1978 through 1999, he taught the class. Then he tried to retire again. "I came out to DeLand and bought this old house, which nobody had lived in for 26 years," Bransford said. "It was really run down. I said all I wanted to do was fix one clock a day and work on the house."

But clocks poured in and he found it hard to say no -- hence a shop crowded with hundreds of chiming, ticking, bim-bamming time-keepers, from cuckoos to grandfather clocks to French imported wall clocks. His favorites: the Atmos clocks, some worth as much as $40,000. An Atmos is perpetual -- doesn't need winding, but runs by a hermetically sealed capsule filled with ethyl chloride (gas and liquid) which expands and contracts with temperature change. "They shipped one from Anchorage, Alaska, that just came in -- which makes 14 here now to be fixed," Bransford said. "I have six from individuals in New Orleans that were underwater in Katrina. They are government clocks."

Probably one of the most remarkable timepieces Bransford was connected with fixing: Big Ben. He was working at Boise Cascade -- one of only a few companies with a lathe large enough to create an 8-foot and 12-inch by 12-inch slide -- when the replacement part for Big Ben was made and shipped to England. "I watched while it was made and put the part on the plane," Bransford said.

Recently Bransford took a much bigger part of a public clock repair project -- as a volunteer -- fixing the clock in the coquina clock tower behind the Hilton Hotel. The landmark once dominated the World's Most Famous Beach as part of a Works Progress Administration creation constructed in 1936. The WPA created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a New Deal agency that employed millions of Americans affected by the Great Depression. The early construction included a promenade, arcade booths and a band shell and the towering clock, visible above most everything else in the area. Most of the WPA construction was demolished in favor of new development in the late 1970s.

"Bird droppings and salt corrosion had ruined the clock, the dials, and it wasn't running," said Randy Jaye of Orlando, president of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors of Daytona Beach.

Kathleen Oprian, spokesman for Bird-X Inc. of Chicago, a manufacturer of bird deterrent products, said it's no surprise that bird poop stopped the clock, since "bird droppings are extremely corrosive." To help solve the problem city workers built a new stainless steel mount in the tower, and Jaye, Bransford and Jim Zeisler of Daytona Beach worked with the city to replace parts to retrofit the historic clock. Bransford acquired new motors, hands and other parts from the American Time and Signal Co. of Minnesota, using his own account to get a discount, which brought the project in at about half the initial $5,000 budget. "Tom called and sent all kinds of pictures and information on the restorations he was going to do on the clock,' said Rosie Karg, a spokeswoman for American Time and Signal. "The system was ancient and now everything is more compact. He had a lot of work to do to refit the new pieces to work with the tower."

"I am so darned glad it's over," said Zeisler, 66, a retired firefighter from Columbus, Ohio. "The idea was hatched three years ago, and it took this long to come to fruition."

But it turns out there's a glitch which the association members hope to resolve with the help of American Time and Signal. The hands are a fraction too long and must lean out to clear the tower. "You can't just cut them off because they have to be counterbalanced," said Bransford. Fixing the problem with take "patience and a good mechanical mind," he said. He's working on the problem -- and will take care of it when he has a little more time on his hands.

Note: On Tuesday, May 27, 2008 the city of Daytona Beach brought a bucket lift truck to the coquina Clock Tower and lifted Jim Zeisler to remove the minute hands on all four dials. Tom Bransford cut and shaved the ends of the minute hands, and then Jim Zeisler re-attached the hands on all four dials. Now all four clocks are running smoothly and keeping synchronized time.
--Randy Jaye--

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

News-Journal/Nigel Cook

At left is a file photo of the clock tower as it looked in 1976, before it was dwarfed by hotels and condos. At right is a current photo showing the clock tower and some of its environs.

 

Chapter 154 - In the News - March 22, 2008

                                                                LOCAL NEWS - March 22, 2008


N-J | Nigel Cook

Local clock expert Jim Zeisler places new hands on the clock tower Friday on the boardwalk in Daytona Beach.



 

March 22, 2008

Beach time ticks once again


DAYTONA BEACH -- A coquina clock tower, once the dominant landmark on the World's Most Famous Beach, has been in serious need of a makeover.

But with a $5,000 commitment from the city, volunteer clock experts replaced the 70-year-old timepiece Friday.

"Bird droppings and salt corrosion had ruined the clock, the dials, and it wasn't running," said Randy Jaye of Orlando, president of The National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors of Daytona Beach.

Jaye said Tom Bransford, a nationally recognized watchmaker from DeLand who once worked on London's Big Ben, removed the clock motor in January.

Bransford said the old motor might be refurbished and placed in the Halifax Historical Society Museum but wasn't sure. City offices were closed Friday.

Bransford acquired new motors, hands and other parts from the American Time and Signal Co. of Minnesota, using his own account to get a discount, which brought the project in at about half the budget.

City workers built a new stainless steel mount for the clock in the tower, which was part of a 1936 Work Progress Administration creation. The WPA, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a New Deal agency that employed millions of Americans affected by the Great Depression.

The early construction included a promenade, arcade booths and a band shell, but most of the construction was demolished in favor of new development in the late 1970s. The clock tower -- officially dedicated in 1938 -- was preserved, along with the band shell.

In 1980, the local clock association rescued the clock, which had clogged up from bird droppings. A rededication occurred in 1989.

In 1999, the structure was listed with the National Register of Historic Places.

Clock expert Jim Zeisler of Daytona Beach joined Bransford and Jaye in the most recent restoration project.

"I am so darned glad it's over," Zeisler said. "The idea was hatched three years ago, and it took this long to come to fruition."

Jaye said the clock restoration is not the end of the makeover. Additional work on the tower by the city will include draining and restoring the fountain and installing two ventilation vents to circulate air around the new clock motors.

But a key change must be continuing maintenance and keeping pigeons and other birds out of the Clock Tower and away from the clockworks, Jaye said.

"It looks great," Bransford said. "And this time it should last forever."

audrey.parente@news-jrnl.com

 

 

Chapter 154 Custom-Made Polo Shirts (Very High Quality including embroidery with 1400 stitches)

                                                           

Pricing:     $25.00 (Sizes: S, M, L, XL)
     $27.00 (Size: 2XL)
     $28.00 (Size: 3XL)

                                                                                                                      Made by: GILDAN Active Wear 

FEATURES:

  • 100% ultra-cotton pique polo
  • Preshrunk cotton
  • Quarter-turned
  • Tapes welt collar 
  • 3 wood-tone buttons
  • Welt cuffs
  • Double needle stitched hemmed bottom

SIZE CHART:

(in inches)

S

M

L

XL

2XL

3XL

Body Length
Body Width
Sleeve Length

29
19
8.5

30
21
9

31
23
9.5

32
25
10

33
27
10.5

33
29
11

 

SHIRT COLOR:

YELLOW HAZE

 

 

 

Contact Information (Chapter 154 - Daytona Beach)

Chapter Officers (2008)

President: Randy Jaye

Secretary/Treasurer: Viviane Lindeolsson

Vice-President: Jesse McKnight

Director: Ed Epp

Director: Tom Bransford

Chapter Contact Telephone:
(386) 439-2459 (Ed Epp)
 
Electronic mail (email)
General Information: Ed Epp - gaspump@cfl.rr.com
Web Administrator: Randy Jaye - 1970hemicuda@comcast.net

                                                                                                                           

 

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Last modified: June 13, 2008