Cape couple helps customers 'keep' time

Sean and Nancy Barnes used to hold conventional jobs but now devote themselves to a business fixing mechanical clocks.

Called S&N Clock Repair, the couple works out of a shop next to their home in Cape's Rolling Hills Subdivision.

Sean, a Jackson High graduate, says early American timepieces used to be their specialty, but the fledgling business has since broadened its focus.

"We're working on three clocks now from Europe, including one dating from the Battle of Britain in World War II," he said.

Barnes explains in 1940 the German Luftwaffe bombed various sites in the United Kingdom as Hitler focused his territorial ambitions on cities such as London.

"A bomb would hit a house and a clock would fall off a mantel," Barnes said.

"People took their shattered clocks and built cases to preserve them," he added, referring to such contraptions as "bomb-outs."

A growing fascination

Sean said he'd been working on clocks "off and on" for 18 years while working a desk job for Quality Packaging Industries near the Proctor and Gamble plant.

He began to apprentice with an older man for a time and began to fix clocks in their home, later expanding to a shop when he and Nancy ran out of room in their residence.

"One day, one of the women at QPI -- knowing about our growing home-based business -- asked me why we weren't devoting ourselves to it," Sean said.

"I handed in my resignation not long after and haven't looked back since," adding S&N began as a going concern in September 2017.

Detail work has long been a part of Barnes' work life.

"I used to be a floor installer for 15 years, putting down ceramic, tile and hardwood, pretty much everything but carpet," he said, adding while such a vocation was rewarding, it was hard on his knees.

"I'm a hands-on type of person and enjoy working for myself a lot more because of the freedom plus we've met a lot of people fixing clocks," Barnes said.

Nancy, a Chaffee grad working for Saint Francis Medical Center, joined Sean in the business full-time three months ago and the couple's 24-year old son, Dylan, has now begun an apprenticeship with his parents.

The appeal

Sean said it is not only the mechanics of clocks that attracts him but also the history and artwork embedded in them.

"The carvings and the painted glass in these old clocks are amazing," he said, noting clocks from the late 1800s to early 1900s are their "bread and butter," and the timepieces are nearly always family heirlooms.

"(Mechanical clock repair) is a dying art (and) not many of us are around to fix them these days," Sean said.

"I like to say clocks are a bit like how guns used to be in that (firearms) went from black powder to all the multiple spinning barrels," he said.

"It's the same way with clocks in that you can see how things have progressed throughout the years," Barnes added.

Connections

Sean said social media has brought the couple friends all over the world who share their love of clocks.

"We help each other out and if we're having a problem with a timepiece, one of us can walk the other through it," he added, noting cyberspace has hooked him up with other clock repairers in the U.S., Canada, Germany, England, South Africa, Australia and Asia.

The territory

Sean said their business tries to stay within a 50-mile radius of Cape but notes they've done work for clock aficionados in St. Genevieve and Poplar Bluff as well as for customers in Arkansas, Kentucky and Illinois.

To give an idea about a fee, Barnes said S&N charges $200 to work on an American spring wound time strike clock.

The couple has a Facebook page and a website, snclockrepair.com.

"What we've found is that (mechanical) timepieces can mean an awful lot to people," Sean said.