For a long time, luxury meant expensive and rare. What is rare today, above all, are hours in which nobody needs you and nothing lights up on a screen. A mechanical DIY model turns those hours into something you can touch. A table clock with a tourbillon, for example, which you build over several evenings and which then runs on your desk.
What Enzensberger sensed back in 1996
In 1996, the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote an essay about the luxury of the future. The superfluous, he argued, would lose its shine. What would become precious is what is scarce: peace and quiet, for example, and time you are free to use as you wish (Die Furche on Enzensberger's essay, in German).
Today you can count how scarce it is. On average, people in Germany have just over six hours of free time a day, and almost half of it goes to media. For their own projects, sport and games, just over an hour is left in the end (Federal Statistical Office, Time Use Survey 2022, in German).
What do you pay for in an expensive watch?
In a high-end mechanical wristwatch, the value lies not only in gold and sapphire crystal. It lies in hours: a watchmaker assembles the movement by hand and regulates it until it keeps time. The tourbillon is considered the masterpiece – a rotating cage that turns the balance wheel with it and so evens out the effect of gravity.
With the Sky Watcher Tourbillon Table Clock, you are the one at the workbench. 338 wooden parts, about 15 hours of building, spread over as many evenings as you like. Then you wind the spring, and the tourbillon turns for two to three hours.
It won't become a precision watch for your wrist. But afterwards you know why people pay a lot of money for a movement like this. And the hours inside it are your own.
338 parts · approx. 15 hours · Challenge
Sky Watcher Tourbillon Table Clock
A table clock with tourbillon and spring drive, designed as a small observatory.
View modelMore models that are allowed to take their time
These three also run without electricity. A crank or a weight drives them, and they are rated from about 14 years.
| Model | What it does | Build time (evenings of approx. 2 h) |
|---|---|---|
| Mechanical Tellurion | Shows day and night, moon phases and seasons as you turn the crank | approx. 5 hours (2–3 evenings) |
| Mechanical Celesta | Plays melodies, by key or via the crank drum | approx. 8 hours (4 evenings) |
| Aero Clock | Wall clock: a weight drives it, the pendulum regulates it | approx. 11 hours (5–6 evenings) |
Find more here: Clocks · Built to Impress · For your desk
A gift that contains time
For people who already have everything, one simple question helps: when did they last have an evening just for themselves? A model gives them several at once. You'll find ideas under Gifts for women and Gifts for men. If you don't build yourself, this article helps you choose: Gifting a model when you don't build it yourself.
One more difference from an evening in front of a screen: when you switch off the light, your clockwork keeps running for a while.
Sources
- Statistisches Bundesamt (Federal Statistical Office): Zeitverwendungserhebung 2022 – Ergebnisse (revised 06.06.2025). destatis.de
- Waldinger, I.: Der Reiz des Luxus. Die Furche, 22.04.2021 – on H. M. Enzensberger, "Reminiszenzen an den Überfluss" (1996). austria-forum.org