The beginning

My name is Ben and I live in Philadelphia. The more I learn about watches — and the people who spend years mastering the craft behind them — the more respect I have for how much knowledge and experience is required to do any of it well.

For me, the shift from enthusiast to wanting to make things started in a very simple place: Seiko mods and assembling watches from off-the-shelf components with my son.

What began as a fun shared hobby quickly turned into curiosity about how watches actually come together — not just mechanically, but visually. The deeper we went, the more one thing stood out: genuinely thoughtful, bespoke dial work felt surprisingly difficult to access.

There are clearly talented independent makers out there, but the process itself seemed opaque, specialized, and intimidating in the best possible way. That challenge is what pulled me in.

Pine Street Dial Works is intended to be a workshop journal documenting that process openly: the experiments, the incremental improvements, the setbacks, and the slow progression from curiosity into practice.

But for now, the focus is simple:

Learn carefully.
Make thoughtfully.
Document honestly.
Improve continuously.

There’s a German phrase I’ve always liked: Der Weg ist das Ziel — the journey is the destination.

That feels like the right philosophy for this project.

An early lesson in the importance of the ShopVac. Packing styrofoam is the world champion of static cling.