108 Garfield Avenue, Madison, New Jersey 07940
Happiness Is An Old Steam Engine. Titus Brubaker Sr., is shown
filling grease cups aboard his 1903 Peerless engine. This engine
sees a great amount of action at the various shows in the area.
Fortunately there was a tractor parked conveniently to the
sawmill and I slid into the seat to be in a good position to watch
three veterans of steam powered sawing with over two hundred years
of experience. The occasion was the twenty-first annual reunion of
the Early American Steam Engine and Old Equipment Society’s
Steam-O-Rama, July 13 to 15.
This historical society was organized in 1957 by Paul E. White.
For three years they had operated in temporary locations around Red
Lion, Pennsylvania. However, since 1960 they have been in their
permanent location just off Route 24 north of Stewartstown,
Pennsylvania. It is an excellent site on high ground overlooking
the rolling hills of Pennsylvania in the area south of York. Now
that they have a ‘home’ it has been practical to erect some
substantial facilities. And it has also made it possible to install
their sawmill that I had come to watch.
The mill is one built by Geiser Manufacturing Company of
Waynesboro and has the serial number 5989. It has a 48′
circular blade. This day the power was being supplied by a 1903
Peerless Model RR of approximately 12 horsepower. It is owned by
Titus Brubaker St., of Rohrsburg and can usually be seen at the
Rough and Tumble Engineers grounds in Kinzer. Today, Titus was the
engineer and the sawyer was Eli Williams. Eli had a one-man board
of experts in the person of Manny Nafe looking over his shoulder.
So you knew that you were in for a good show.
The project was to make some ‘roofers’ from some
well-seasoned oak logs. There were a few remarks passed over the
loudspeaker about cutting out toothpicks but these veteran
operators paid no attention to any distractions, but went about
their business. Titus was the senior man of the group at 89 years
of age. Eli and Manny wouldn’t admit it but they are in about
the same time frame compared to the muscle-bound youngsters that
they let feed the logs to the carriage. It shows real management
capability to let the other guy do the heavy lifting while you use
your superior knowledge in the heavy thinking department.
There was much whirring of the saw blade cutting into dry oak
and the rattle of the carriage on the return trip. Gradually the
pile of roofers grew and the logs diminished. First, trim up the
log and face it to get the most boards out, then run the boards
through in piles to cut out the roofers. And, all of the time
hardly a word passed between the crew. Each knew his job and did
it. I was interested to watch Titus Brubaker on the engine. It
seemed to me that he was busy tending water and putting in a shovel
full of coal now and again without hardly even noticing the action
on the mill. But somehow, if an adjustment had to be made to the
saw guide, for example, the mill stopped as it should and then
started. No shouting and hollerin’ back and forth. Just an easy
flow of work typical of the thousands of board feet of lumber that
has been cut on rigs of this type. They have survived the large
band mills and still are very much a part of our national scene. In
fact, Manny Nafe has had several of these mills in operation in the
area in recent time.
I wonder why it is traditional to do the family wash on Monday,
the ironing on Tuesday and so each day has its’ assigned task.
Well, I can remember Monday as being wash day because as a child I
can remember having to turn the crank of an old wooden tub
corrugated agitator washing machine in my grandmother’s
kitchen. That was one of the few times that school seemed like a
better idea. Well, Renoll Hall has a better idea. He has trained
his dog, Mabel, to power the family washing machine on a treadmill.
This one is a First Prize Dog Power machine built by the Vermont
Farm Machine Company of Bellows Falls, Vermont. The patent date on
the unit is January 8, 1884. Mabel just has to be the biggest
‘ham’ that you will ever see. When she hops up on the
treads she will just stand there looking around for some
encouragement from her audience. If they look interested, she will
start to trundle along with now and then a bark as if to say,
‘You can applaude.’ For, when she stops on command, she
actually expects the audience to applaud, which of course, they do.
Several times during the course of the show she will put on her
‘act’ but there came a time when the wash was finished that
she just simply did not want to get off the tread-belt and sat down
as if going on strike for bigger dog biscuit rations.
The Geiser sawmill makes ‘roofers’ as a demonstration
with Eli Williams as sawyer and Titus Brubaker Sr., as engineer on
the 1903 Peerless.
Mabel willingly supplies the power for the family wash on this
Vermont farm machinery company first prize dog power while Renoll
Hall works the controls.
Mabel ‘strikes’ for higher rations for work on this
Vermont farm machine company first prize dog power. Renoll Hall,
her trainer, is the negotiator in the dispute.
Stuart Leiphart unloads his scale traction engine from his truck
for the show. This beautifully crafted engine was built by this
former machinest of the A. B.Farquhar Company.
I think that one of the reasons that she does the demonstration
as often as she does is so that her trainer, Renoll Hall, can get
out of the job that he has found himself in at the big copper pot
where the apple butter is made. It takes a long time to make apple
butter. The cut-up apples are cooked for about twelve hours over a
wood fire that seems to add a bit of distinctive flavor to the
butter. The hard work to the job is that the mixture is constantly
stirred for the twelve hours and one turn can get very long if a
relief does not show up. So when the announcer calls for another
dog power demonstration Renoll has reason to turn over the wooden
paddle to someone else for a while.
In a three-day show not every piece of equipment gets there the
first morning. But, not so with Stuart (‘Jake’) Leiphart
from nearby Spry. Also, not everyone has the space for a full size
steam traction engine. Jake has solved this problem through
building his own engine which he can carry around in his pick-up
truck. Many of the owners and operators of steam engines are doing
so as a consequence of having used them for years on their farms or
in doing threshing or sawmilling. Jake, on the other hand, has a
different background. At age 22 he apprenticed as a machinist after
having worked in the boiler shop of the A. B. Farquhar Company in
York. He worked for them until 1923 and saw many parts for their
machines come into reality under his care with his skill. Thus, it
was natural for him to take on the job of building his own steam
engine.
So, he drove into the grounds with his engine in the back of the
truck and was among the first exhibits to arrive. The engine was
soon offloaded with ease and a fire started in the boiler. The very
act of unloading gives one some inkling of his inventiveness for in
addition to the obviously necessary ramp there is a built-in winch
system that lets it down gently….not a ‘store bought’
winch either. Every piece has had an earlier ancestry in some other
use but now pressed into another service. For those interested in
fine workmanship it is possible to just stand for a while and take
in the detail. The engine, the boiler, the tanks, everything
superbly crafted either by machining or welding.
It is a poor day when you can’t learn something. As I
watched the engine begin to heat up and a bit of pressure show on
the gauge there was a little leak around the water glass. Jake
said, ‘Don’t worry, that’ll take up.’ At first I
thought that he meant that as the parts warmed up and the
differential expansion of glass and steel became effective the leak
would stop. Not so. He had a special boiler compound that he had
added when he filled the boiler. Now if you have worked around low
pressure boilers any time at all, surely there is going to be
another boiler compound salesman pressure you into trying his
latest development. Most of them turn out to be tanin in one form
or another or even maybe sodium metaphosphate which your wife buys
at Oakite. Of course, if you want to talk 2400 pounds pressure then
its maybe hydrozene. After a little talking, Jake confided in me
what it was and I guess that it is okay to pass along the
knowledge….no warrantly implied. He dug around in the tool box
and came up with a can of McCormick’s ‘ground ginger!’
I always thought that ginger was only good for making ginger
bread.
Speaking of bread let’s get over to the cornmeal operation
run by M. C. Dellinger from Red Lion. He and Renoll Hall and
friends have nice business at the show in course and stone ground
cornmeal. They have a little hand operated shelter but from there
on it is a powered operation. The course grinding is powered by a 1
HP Hercules engine. However, the bigger operation for stone ground
meal takes more power and for this they use a 5 HP Hercules engine.
This mill is a real collector’s item. It is a Samuel
Lieberkuect Number 210 made in Hellam, Pennsylvania. With the
little horse and a half pop pop poping away and the old 5 horse
Hercules banging away it takes some doing on the hand sheller to
keep up the feed of shelled corn to the machines.
When I see Titus Brubaker puttering away filling grease cups on
his engine and maybe Jake Leipert firing his engine that is when it
is obvious that happiness is an old steam engine. But, we should
not lose sight of the fact that there are other powers. Naturally,
the gas engines come to mind, but I have something else in mind and
that is the old hot air engine so successfully used in water
pumping. And, now on the threshold of possible revival as an
automobile engine through development underway at the Ford Motor
Company. These engines are of a class generally shown as Stirling
cycle engines after their inventor, Robert Stirling. This cycle was
developed and patented in 1816 but never really got the attention
that the internal combustion engine received. Nikolaus August
Otto’s 1876 invention of the spark ignited internal combustion
engine and later developed by Rudolf Diesel in 1892 of the
compression ignited internal combustion engine have overshadowed
the hot air engine as we know it in our Steam-O-Rama type meetings.
However, this highly sophisticated thermodynamic process which was
conceived by a Scottish minister of the gospel has, in today’s
circumstances, several properties that suggest that it should be
revived.
It has good full load efficiency, say 30% compared to 26% for
spark and diesels and an even better part load performance than
they have. Its power to weight ratio is acceptable and its overall
output is some better since auxiliaries can be less in some
instances. However, at the moment the greatest interest comes from
the fact that it burns fuel at essentially continuously optimum
conditions thus resulting in less air pollution.
Allen Ruhl demonstrates the operation of his Denny Improved
Ericsson Hot Air pumping engine. This machine was built by the
American Machine Company of Newark, Delaware.
Well, now that I have told you all that I know about hot air
engines with a lot of my own hot air, let’s get down to cases
with a look at a marvelously restored Hot Air Pumping Engine in the
form of a Denny Improved Ericsson engine. This was manufactured by
the American Machine Company of Newark, Delaware, around 1900. It
has been successfully re-manufactured by C. Allen Ruhl of New
Freedom, and makes a beautiful sight at the show. The pile of wood
in front of the engine suggests that he uses that as fuel, but
based on my observation and just between us friends, I think that
he fires it with the butts of those ‘cegars’ he smokes.
Any ‘heat engine’…..gas engine, diesel, steam engine
or aircraft gasturbine….extracts work from the flow of heat from
a high temperature heat source to a lower temperature heat sink. In
the case of most of the engines at the show, they simply blast to
the atmosphere thus using it as their heat sink. The pumping engine
very quietly uses the water that it is pumping from a cool well as
its heat sink. There is hardly a sound when this machine is
working. Maybe your future automobile will be quieter and cleaner
if Ford and N. V. Phillips Gloeilampen fabricken in the Netherlands
are successful.
When I started to write this article I really ‘put my foot
into it,’ as the saying goes, assuming that I could get
together all of the facts and pictures to make it ‘hold
water.’ However, I think that I am not as far into a potential
problem area as a resident of nearby Bel Air, Maryland, is when he
tells the newspaper that he has been following up on accounts of
sightings of ‘Bigfoot’ which began in the area in 1972.
There have been mysterious slaughterings of chickens on farms in
the vicinity and even the finding of large footprints which he has
preserved with plaster casts. On one occasion up along Big Muddy
Creek some campers had had rocks mysteriously thrown at them. Since
I had planned to stay in my trailer while in the area, I didn’t
think that that sort of activity was exactly one of a friendly
countryside. But I figured that a 7%’ tall humanoid weighing,
he estimated, some 350 pounds wouldn’t like my cooking so I was
probably safe. When I make a trip into an area for something as
specific as the Steam-O-Rama, Hook for other things to add to the
interest and to complete the trip. Bigfoot wasn’t, however, in
my plans.
Philadelphia Electric Company’s high temperature gas cooled
nuclear reactor as viewed from their Information Center at Peach
Bottomnear Stewartstown, PA.
There are other things to do in the same area that should be of
interest to those interested in old engines. Nearby, the
Philadelphia Electric Company has a nuclear information center at
Peach Bottom. This is the location of the experimental high
temperature gas cooled reactor (HTGR) and where they have two
1,000,000 kilowatt nuclear generators of the boiling water type
(BWR). These are in a beautiful setting along the Susquehanna River
and well worth visiting. The fuel may be more exotic than coal or
wood or straw, but it is still a steam cycle. So, though I had been
watching with interest the steam power of the past it was also
interesting to visit a plant with steam power of the future. An
American flag was slowly fluttering in the breeze with the
experimental reactor in the background as I looked from the
Center’s observation platform. I couldn’t help but think,
‘I trust that flag is strong enough in the future to keep the
powerful force of the atom harnessed for peace not war.’