Dewey Vicknair
Dewey Vicknair is a master gunsmith based in Pennsylvania who built a decades-long reputation restoring rifles and shotguns — searching his name online turns up dozens of approving mentions across firearms forums — before turning, self-taught and already in his mid-fifties, to watchmaking. He had been servicing watches on the side for years when, by his own account, encountering coverage of Atelier de Chronométrie's work reviving vintage Omega movements inspired him to make the leap from repairing watches to building one. His debut wristwatch, completed in 2024, started from a 1950s Omega cal. 266 but ended up substantially remade: he skeletonized the base plate, built the going-train and balance bridges from raw brass entirely from scratch, and fabricated the case, dial, and hands from steel stock — leaving only the balance wheel and hairspring from the original movement untouched. To get there he had to build much of his own tooling, including a custom cutter for the crown's silicone gasket and a dedicated screw holder for black polishing, and the silver plating of the movement's bridges and plate was done by Vicknair himself. The watch's manufacture is documented in an exhaustive photo essay on his blog, almost every step shot in close-up, made with old-school, hand-operated machines rather than CNC equipment.
His second watch, completed in 2025, pushed further: a regulator-style display with a jumping hour, again built around a heavily reworked Omega cal. 266 base plate and going train, this time with a hand-shaped three-quarter bridge decorated in classical perlage and wide Geneva stripes, gold-plated entirely at his own bench. The jump-hour mechanism uses a star-wheel system advanced by a finger on the center pinion, and Vicknair built two separate free-sprung balance wheels with a pantograph — a mechanical engraving technique famously used by Breguet for his secret-signature dials — before scrapping the first, a Gyromax-style design, for feeling out of place against the movement's more classical lines. He hand-bent the Breguet overcoil hairspring using custom tweezers of his own making, hand-engine-turned the barrel cover, and used the same pantograph to skeletonize the barrel click wheel, cut the balance wheel, and sign the steel Calatrava-style case he machined from a solid ingot.
His third watch, a bespoke retrograde-hours wristwatch delivered in mid-2026 after roughly a year on commission for an unnamed collector, is loosely based on the same Omega-derived going train but otherwise built from raw brass and steel sheet, including a 30mm mainplate milled entirely by hand. Its retrograde mechanism — sweeping a 240-degree arc and snapping back via a spring-tensioned rack — draws on a rare design from George Daniels' 'Edward Hornby' tourbillon pocket watch, reworked with wolf's-tooth gearing partway between Daniels' original solution and the more elaborate version later used by Daniel Roth in the C127 Retrograde. The 39mm Calatrava-style steel case, also entirely self-made, carries an open-worked dial with green-toned retrograde hands, an emerald cabochon set into the crown, hand-formed Breguet overcoil, hand-grained English-style frosting on the plate, black-polished steel keyless works, and a pink-gold-plated finish achieved in his own small plating bath. Across all three watches, Vicknair operates without external suppliers for cases, dials, hands, or movement architecture — outsourcing only items like the raw hairspring and jewels — making him one of a small handful of working American artisan horologists building watches essentially from raw material with manually operated machines, in the company of names like David E. Walter and Jacob Curtis.