Antique Restoration Shop for Clocks: Smith Clock Co. on Bush

Smith Clock Co. sits at 2799 Bush Street, on the corner of Baker Street in Lower Pacific Heights, and its windows are packed with grandfather clocks. Owner David Smith has been restoring and repairing clocks since 1975.

The shop splits in two. Smith sells grandfather clocks in the front room, and in the back he repairs antique clocks for dealers and tends the heirlooms that neighborhood residents carry in. A 2011 profile in The New Fillmore counted more than 40 clocks for sale. Tools and parts cover nearly every flat surface of the workshop, and the ticking of dozens of movements is the first thing you notice when the door opens.

The range is wide. Hoodline's visit listed American, French, English, German, Dutch and Austrian makers among his repairs, and the back room held banjo clocks, grandfather clocks, a 1930s Art Moderne electric clock with a green dial and an ornate cuckoo. Smith's favorite, he says, is usually whichever clock is on the bench.

Smith starts every job by working out provenance. “It’s like reading a book in a different language,” he told The New Fillmore in August 2026. “You look at the way a French clock is designed, then you look at a Dutch or a Swedish piece — it’s night and day.” Knowing the maker and period tells him how the movement was built and which parts are likely to fail.

Mechanical clocks wear in predictable ways. A key winds the mainspring, the spring turns the gear train, and the tick comes from gear teeth engaging and releasing, so worn pivots, tired springs and dry bushings are the usual culprits. He is especially drawn to the complicated work: lunar calendars, chimes and the melodies built into clocks that are sometimes centuries old.

Patience is part of the price. In a 2018 Hoodline profile, Smith said that tracking down a required part can take anywhere from a week to a year, that a simple repair could cost as little as nine dollars, and that bringing a major antique back to life could run as much as $5,000. “The clock is the customer,” he likes to say.

Smith found his first clocks as a boy on his father's San Francisco real estate jobs, where former occupants left furniture behind. “The clocks were just like gold,” he recalls. He was taking them apart at eight and was ten before someone asked whether any of them actually worked.

In 1975 he took a job at a Daly City furniture store setting up and servicing customers' clocks. He then went through City College of San Francisco's clock repair program, which no longer runs, and apprenticed for about a decade with local clock repairers. He opened his own shop on Fillmore Street before moving to the current corner on Bush.

Many customers are decorators and antique dealers, some driving in from well outside the city, but plenty of jobs are personal. Smith has told interviewers that several clients asked him to repair clocks for aging parents, who found the chime of the family grandfather clock a comfort. In 2011 he called his business “about the only shop like this left in San Francisco.”

He also gives practical buying advice. San Francisco Victorians have smaller rooms, he points out, so a clock with less depth suits them better than a deep case that would work in a larger house down the Peninsula. If you are shopping the front room, measure the wall and the ceiling height before you fall for a seven-foot longcase.

The shop has also become a fixture of San Francisco's repair revival. The August 2026 New Fillmore piece ran as part of a series by reEnvisionRepair, a grassroots group founded by Kathryn Hyde that has interviewed and photographed more than 40 local repair businesses since 2018. A 2024 version of the profile appeared in the San Francisco Bay View for Black History Month, and it described the shop as being in what is now called Lower Pacific Heights.

There is no working website with posted hours. For a grandfather clock, remove the weights and pendulum before moving the case, and wrap the pendulum separately so the suspension spring does not snap. Mantel and cuckoo clocks travel best upright in a box padded with towels.

Skip the temptation to oil a stopped movement at home. Spray lubricants attract dust that grinds pivots down, and the cleanup adds to the bill. If the clock still runs but chimes at the wrong hour, describe that on the phone, since it is often an adjustment rather than a full restoration.

Divisadero Street is two blocks east of the shop, and the 24 Divisadero bus runs along it. On the same stretch, Yury's Lights & Beyond restores antique lamps and chandeliers, so you can drop a clock with Smith and a broken lamp base with Yury in one trip.

Walk northeast up the hill to Alta Plaza Park, whose terraced lawns and new tennis courts look over the city toward the bay, then drift down to Fillmore Street for its bookshops, cafes and boutiques. Japantown is about a fifteen-minute walk southeast if you want a bowl of ramen before heading home.

Address: 2799 Bush Street at Baker Street, San Francisco, CA 94115. When you call, have the clock's type, approximate age and the problem ready, and leave a message if he is at the bench. Restorations can take weeks or longer when parts must be found, so do not drop off a clock you need running for a holiday that is only days away.

Take a few phone photos of the dial, the back of the movement and any maker's stamp before you go, which speeds up his provenance check. Ask the Karpo APP for a coffee stop on Fillmore Street or a dinner spot on Divisadero to round out the afternoon.