STEAM ENGINE BUILT FROM THE GROUND UP

Stark said he was always on hand to help his grandfather and
uncle clean and repair a 1909 Gaar-Scott double cylinder steam
engine they used for threshing and to operate a sawmill.

When Stark was old enough, his grandfather and uncle allowed him
to replace flues in the engine and to haul water to it when they
were threshing fields.

But one thing he always wanted to do and never did was to
operate the engine himself.

Stark’s model building efforts stemmed from a trip he made
to his first Indiana State Fair when he was 12 years old.

‘I saw a model steam engine in a glass case that some
gentleman had built,’ Stark said. His imagination captured by
the display, Stark vowed that he too would build a model engine one
day if he ever had he right machine tools.

Stark, who went to work at Allison in 1951, acquired the tools
necessary to keep his promise and built a one- inch scale model of
a steam engine 15 years ago.

It took him about 4¹/₂ years to complete
the model, which has 815 handmade ‘little bitty pieces,’
Stark said. Some of the pieces are so small he had to wear a
jeweler’s eye piece as he made them.

While admiring the model, one of Stark’s uncles asked him
why he didn’t make one big enough to ride on.

‘I let about five or six years go by before I decided to
make a bigger model’ Stark said. He decided to build a model
half the size of the original steam engine because everything would
be better balanced and in proportion at that size and it would also
be a little bigger model than anyone else had built, he added.

It was a job that demanded all of the manufacturing and
blueprint reading and drawing skills that Stark, a foreman in the
turbine-blade section at Allison, had acquired. Although Gaar-Scott
engines were originally manufactured in Richmond, Indiana, the
company went out of business in the 1920s, Stark said.

He found a 1909 Gaar-Scott engine in working condition and used
it along with a reprinted 1909 catalogue to make sketches,
blueprints and patterns.

He made his first sketches in 1973 and ended up six years later
with a bushel basket full of drawings he used to make blueprints
for every piece on his model engine.

Grabbing a spare hour here and there, Stark worked away in his
garage, making most of the pieces for the coal and wood-fired model
engine, which stands about 6¹/₂ feet high to
the top of its’ smoke stack and weighs about 4,050 pounds when
its’ water tanks are full.

Stark said he received help from co-workers in determining
specifications for the engine and materials, and two friends loaned
him equipment he needed to complete the task. He put a brass plate
on the side of the boiler dedicating the steam engine to those who
inspired him to do something better as a model maker.

When all the pieces were ready, he began to assemble the engine
in August 1978.

Once it was assembled and operating, Stark hauled it to several
steam engine shows and festivals last summer and fall. At those
shows, he said he was paid the highest compliment when spectators
told him the engine was ‘the finest machine work and model work
they had ever seen.’

People often guess it cost him about $7,000 to build the engine,
but Stark said, ‘I kept track of every penny I spent, and I
have a little more than $1,300 invested in it.’

The model engine ‘helps you live in the past,’ he said.
‘Young people today don’t realize how hard people had to
work years ago to achieve something.’