On Waiting: Eighteen Months of Running-In
A new orrery is not finished when it is assembled. It is finished when it has run.
Every instrument that leaves the workshop runs on our test stand for eighteen weeks before delivery. This is not superstition and it is not marketing. Steel and brass settle against each other, the lacquer hardens to its final depth of colour, and the small heroic noise a new escapement makes quiets into the sound the drawings promise.
Collectors sometimes ask whether we could skip the stand and deliver sooner. We could, and the instrument would still work. It would not yet be itself. A fusee chain run for eighteen weeks sits in its groove the way a shoe fits after a month of walking: the same parts, a different object.
The stand itself is a bench of ten clamps cut from a single oak beam that came with the building in 1908. Each clamp holds one model at working height, levelled with a spirit level older than any of us. We log the rate every morning before the first tea, and the log book for the stand runs to nineteen volumes.
What we watch for is drift. A new mechanism loses or gains a few seconds a day while it finds its stride, and the pattern of that drift tells an experienced ear more than any dial reading. By week fourteen the drift flattens. By week eighteen we stop logging and start packing.
So when your instrument arrives already running true, it is not luck. It has been quietly living here longer than you knew, learning its own time.