Hudson Mickey’s route into mechanical watchmaking began with a family heirloom: a rectangular Bulova that had belonged to his great-grandfather. In an interview published in 2024, Mickey described how curiosity about that watch led to repair classes, an internship and formal study at Lititz Watch Technicum—where he built a school watch around an ETA 6497 and made hand finishing its defining feature. In 2025, the Horological Society of New York named him first-prize winner of its Simon Willard Award for School Watches.
How a family watch led Hudson Mickey to watchmaking
Mickey told Robin Nooy of MONOCHROME that he was twelve when his grandmother found his great-grandfather’s old rectangular Bulova high-school graduation watch among family belongings and passed it to him. The watch prompted him to investigate how watches worked and to learn the difference between mechanical and quartz timekeeping. His interest became a focused pursuit at about fourteen, when he began taking watch-repair classes at a small jewelry store in his hometown. MONOCHROME’s 2024 interview is the source for this early biography.
From repair classes to Lititz Watch Technicum
In summer 2022, Mickey completed a six-week internship at J.N. Shapiro Watches in Los Angeles. He said the experience shifted watchmaking from a serious hobby toward a life direction, and introduced him to high-end finishing; he tried beveling there for the first time. He also described visiting Philippe Narbel’s workshop in the Vallée de Joux and attending Narbel’s beveling masterclass in Los Angeles.
Mickey completed high school in June 2023 and chose watchmaking school instead of a traditional college route. The 2024 profile described him, at that time, as 19 and studying at Lititz Watch Technicum (LWT) in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Those are dated details from the interview, not claims about his present age or enrollment.
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“The main thing is that everything—from what they teach to how it is taught—changes the lens from which you see the mechanics. They teach you how to think like a watchmaker.”
That was Mickey’s description of what formal study changed for him: not only a set of techniques, but the way he understood a movement and approached its mechanics.
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The school watch: an ETA 6497 base and student-made bridges
Mickey’s school watch used an ETA 6497 movement as its base, a common starting point for school-watch projects. In his interview, he said he made the escape-wheel bridge and train bridge using lathes, then hand-filed the bridge sides to test his shaping skills. These process details are his account; no independent technical inspection is cited here.
The bridge work also connects to the Simon Willard Award’s stated expectations. The Horological Society of New York (HSNY) says entrants should at minimum manufacture the bridges for their mechanical watch or clock school project. Its award page lists Mickey of Lititz Watch Technicum as the 2025 first-prize winner. HSNY’s award page gives the criteria and awardees.
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What made the finishing personal
Mickey said the project’s emphasis was aesthetics and finishing. He described forming and polishing bevels by hand, aiming for flat surfaces and consistent width. The range of treatments he identified shows how many different surfaces he considered rather than relying on one decorative technique:
- Edges and screws: hand-formed, polished bevels; polished countersinks; and screws that were black-polished and bevelled.
- Wheels: bevelled and satinized train wheels, with nickel plating on the bridges and wheels.
- Distinctive textures: snailing on the crown and ratchet wheel; perlage on the underside of the bridges; and media-blasted bridge sides.
- Bridge surfaces: mirror polishing and Geneva stripes on top.
That list comes from Mickey’s description in the 2024 interview, rather than an independent examination of the watch. It also explains why the school project mattered as a craft exercise: the work combined shaping and machining bridges with careful control of the surfaces that would be seen and handled.
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The award and the plans he described in 2024
HSNY lists Mickey as the first-prize winner of the 2025 Simon Willard Award for School Watches. The award recognizes a student’s mechanical watch or clock school project; the program’s page says awards can reach up to $10,000, which is a program maximum and not a confirmed amount received by Mickey. HSNY’s March 31, 2025 gala recap reports $160,000 awarded across 28 watchmaking students and four watchmaking schools; those are organization-wide totals, not Mickey-specific figures.
In the 2024 interview, Mickey said he planned after graduation to turn a balance staff and make a more ornate dial. He also described a longer-term ambition to design and make a complete movement from scratch. Those were future plans at the time of publication; the sources cited here do not establish whether he later completed them.
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