Last year I had purchased a Weems & Plath Endurance 125 Time and Tide clock for the cabin. It looked great, very nautical. About 5 months after I got it it stopped working properly. The second hand would sit and bounce around 10 and the minute and hour hands were slow. W&P has a lifetime guarantee but you have to send the clock back to them on your dime to get it fixed. Reading reviews of the clock on Amazon this is clearly a very common problem, so common that W&P’s repair form has a checkbox for it. People have indicated that the repaired clock started doing the same thing soon after getting it back so I didn’t have high hopes. I contacted W&P and indicated I wanted a return shipping label for this since it malfunctioned so soon after getting it. The nice lady told me she would look into it. 5 days later I contacted her again as I hadn’t heard anything. She said she needed nothing else from me and would let me know. Well it’s been 12 days and I haven’t heard a peep out of them. I am pretty sad about this. From everything I see online W&P is a respected name, and I guess they used to be, but Mr. Weems and Mr. Plath are probably rolling in their graves seeing the cheap crap the company is churning out these days. The movement in this clock can be replaced for $12. 10% of what I paid to buy it and less than it’d cost to ship it back.
Disgusted I started looking for a ships clock with bells on ebay. I found a Seth Thomas Corsair for about what I paid for the W&P clock and bought it. I know it’s a crap shoot with these clocks since they’re old and the movements aren’t expected to last that long but I figured what the heck. I received a nice clock that keeps very good time and features ships bells. It’s a German Hermle movement built in March of 1969 and still runs great. A similar almost identical clock from W&P costs $1224. I know you can buy the movement for $440 so I guess you’re paying almost $800 for a brass case? I’m really disgusted by W&P’s customer service and quality and probably won’t buy anything from them ever again. If I can find the case from another Seth Thomas Corsair I’ll probably put a comfort meter movement in it to replace the W&P to the right of my nice clock so I can have matching items. The W&P comfort meter hanging there isn’t even put together right. The mount is perfectly square with the boat and the face inside leans to the right several degrees. Poor workmanship all around. Anyone want to buy some janky W&P stuff?
Update – I’ve since emailed W&P twice more about this, one time linking this blog post, and have been ignored. I won’t ever buy any of their stuff ever again.
