Antique Clock Collecting: Cuckoo Clocks

Video Transcript

"I guess I can't get through a series on clock collecting with talking about...without talking about cuckoo clocks, even though personally I don't like them very much. And probably that's because, as a clock repairer and restorer, these can be nightmares to work on. They're the worst combination of cheap and complicated, where you can work on 'em a long time and still have trouble with them once they've run for years and gotten badly worn inside. But, I have to admit they're a lot of fun when the...when they're working and the bird pops out and cuckoos and you hear the cuckooing sound and the gonging. They're...they're fun to watch, and particularly kids like them, too. They're still made today. They're a product of the Black Forest in Germany. So, any...any discussion of German clock making certainly has to include cuckoo clocks. You can read more about cuckoo clocks also on my web site and article my wife wrote on that subject to learn more about the history of them. This gives you kind of an example of...a...of...a...what's happened to cuckoo clock manufacturing. This is an earlier one. A lot of these are hand carved, but in a mass produced way. So you can see big, dead animals and birds, rabbits, hanging off the front of your clock, with fancy carvings up and below here. So this is a relatively early cuckoo clock. Some of this style could be three, four, five...five feet tall. So they're massive carved things, which are very impressive,and those are particularly valuable. But many more have come over since then, up to the present day from Germany. So you have ones like this, where you have figures that end up sawing up there as...as various German folk tunes play, and the bird pops out and water wheels turn. They can be several hundred dollars. People still bring them back as souvenirs from Germany, and enjoy them for awhile. But, they're, again, not particularly high quality. And I hope you don't bring them to me to fix them when they finally break."