A screwdriver got here first.
The name is older than the business. As a kid, "Abyon" was the first word out of my mouth. Family legend has it that, near as anyone could tell, it meant screwdriver. Nobody thought it meant anything. Least of all a career.
Years of watchmaking later, the joke stopped being a joke. A screwdriver is still the single most-used tool on the bench. It’s the only tool capable of unscrewing the bridges and plates from the ebauche or nudging a regulator arm by a hair's width. Abyon Watch is named for the tool that's in my hand all day.
The years weren't short. I started repairing watches at fourteen in my bedroom in my parents' home, and by twenty-three I was running a small branch of Dakota Watch Company. I worked on the fine jewelry side of the trade also: for major diamond retailers, picking up gemology certifications along the way.
The formal training came from Gem City College's School of Watchmaking and Repairing, one of the most competitive and difficult watchmaking programs in the country. Much of its curriculum still traces back to the Joseph Bulova and Elgin Schools of Watchmaking of the Midwestern farm country, where the trade was naturally taught to 18th and 19th century farmers as seasonal work to see them through the winter when the farmland lay dry and covered in snow. The light of the sun being their only guide and a small oil lamp for working at night.
Much of my education happened under an Amish master watchmaker - and there's an easy joke in the Amish part. No electricity means no quartz and no batteries, so mechanical is the only option, which makes their communities some of the last places in the country where old-world watches never stopped being a living trade rather than a museum piece.
But the joke undersells it. Sitting across the bench from someone with a direct, unbroken line to nineteenth-century watchmaking changes how you see the craft. You're not reading about how it used to be done; you're watching it done. That's exactly what pushes me toward the newest movements coming out today: you can't push a trade forward with any real confidence until you've felt, firsthand, where it started.
It's also why "we can't get that part anymore" isn't an answer here. A stem, a screw, or a case tube for a watch nobody supports: if it can't be sourced, it gets machined instead. Vintage or modern, the job gets finished. Full restorations for vintage and late 19th century and early 20th century antiques including pocket watches, and wristwatches included.
We don't decorate a watch to make it look precise. We regulate it until it is.
