Collecting Flip Clocks - You cannot have them all

[Mackey]

When I first started in flip clocks, I was just interested in the Panasonic clock radios (primarily the RC-6025 and the RC-6015), but then it was all Panasonic clock radios. Most of them I subsequently sold off. Then I bought anything and everything that caught my fancy. I have totes full of clocks now. Then I gravitated towards the historic clocks (where I'm mostly at now). Then again I do like the small clocks (Copal 227 and the Copal Caslon 101s being my favorites). Yet, my public display collection remains very eclectic - from the New Haven Flip clocks, the Plato flip clock, then the Sony Digital24, the Koehler cylinder flip and a Josef Mergenhagen Plato reproduction, and my Cifra 3s (I have several but only the modern red on display) and the Cifra 2. It goes on, but you get the idea.

It was a lot easier when I first started ... before this flip clock price explosion that we find ourselves.

Anyway, If I could give any advise to a new fan, it would be ... Don't try to catch them all. Focus on one area. There are simply too many varieties.
For example, I have a shelf of the Copal 227s. I recently got my white one, and I realized that I had lined them up just like a US Copal brochure listed them.


White, black, red, yellow, woodgrain.
However, you could also have the variants of White with black face and black tiles, White with white face and white tiles and on and on with the other colors (I am partial to the white faces and tiles though).
Not to mention that the European and Japanese 227s came in more colors.

Why am I posting this? It's not to brag about the size of my collection. It's just to encourage new collectors to not go crazy. I've got well over a hundred clocks in storage that eventually I'm going to have to do Something with. I'd hate to leave all that for my family to go through when my time is up!