The movement holder our founder bought secondhand in 2011, before Hallowell had a name, finally cracked along one of its jaws this spring after holding more than 400 movements steady during assembly.
We’ve replaced it with a near-identical model rather than upgrading to something fancier — there wasn’t anything wrong with the design, just the metal fatigue of thirteen years of daily clamping. The old one isn’t going in a drawer; it’s getting mounted on the workshop wall.
It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of tool failure that reminds you how much of this work is still just careful hands and simple tools, not machines.