Offshore engineers are an intrepid breed, ever ready to embrace the kind of hardship postings to which other, less hardy professionals give a wide berth. They also share a compulsion for tinkering with things, just to see how they work and how to make them better.
A case in point is Lorne Gifford (pictured), a subsea engineer currently working on ultra-deepwater developments offshore Angola, except here the habit seems to have gone beyond ‘tinkering’ and entered the realms of business sideline.
Gifford, who has been playing around with mechanical watches for years, recently built what he modestly describes not only as ’the best hand-built chronograph anywhere in the world’ but also ‘the ideal watch for the field engineer in the oil industry’. Dubbed the Offshore Professional Field Engineer, the timepiece is, according to Gifford, ‘sufficiently good that I’ve started making more than just one or two examples. At £1475 each, he rates them ‘a bit of a bargain’ at the moment and says he is delighted with the watches’ growing popularity. To date he has sold four, but, he quips, ‘I won’t be giving up the “day job” just yet.’
‘Having set up a limited company, so I can do the accounts properly, it turns out I’ve become one of only a handful of British watch companies that today actually design, engineer and build watches,’ he told OE. ‘A pity really, considering Britain has a fine horological history that has only recently been taken over by the Swiss!’
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