Lindsay: Pipe Dreams of Old-Time Machinists

Pipe Dreams & Reminiscences of Old-Time Machinists
reprinted by Lindsay Publications Inc

From 1919 to 1920 Glenn Quharity wrote a series of amusing articles in American Machinist Magazine about the old days entitled "Pipe Dreams of a Tramp Machinist". And then from 1920 to 1921, R. Thomas Huntington wrote about his early experiences in a series he called "Reminiscences of an Old School Machinist". Here, you get both series.

You get: Why the Super Drove Slowly, Why the Scales Didn't Work, Pop "Falls Out" with Tom, Fixing the Waterwheel Gate, The Budding of Genius, How Peter Found Tom, The Practice of a Mystic Art, English as She is Spelled, An Apprenticeship of Auld Lang Syne, and more.

Huntington talks about his days surfacing valve seats on a locomotive, fitting the ports to a templet, making cast-iron balls by hand, a predecessor of "Armistice Day" (the spontaneous celebration for the end of the Civil War in 1865), and more.

Fun reading as told by the guys who lived and worked more than a 125 years ago. Some drawings as illustrations. A few machine ads we put in from 1881. Get a copy! 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 softcover 64 pages

No. 24000 ... $7.95

The Brookdell Co. had two waterwheels and a steam engine to furnish power for the shop. In the summer there was not any too much water and the wheels sometimes lay down on their job, leaving the faithful old engine to carry the load alone. Indeed, there were times when the water played out entirely and the wheels became windmills, dragging on the engine until six o'clock came when we could disconnect them.

Nowadays, when they want to disconnect the waterwheels the engineer sends a boy to pull the clutches. The boy proceeds to a part of the shop directly over the wheel-pits and proceeds leisurely to "unscrew" a large polished handwheel, whistling merrily the while such tunes as "Yankee Doodle" or "The Little Birch Canoe," but 30 years ago large friction clutches were not plentiful in small town shops and as the power from the wheels was delivered through a 30-in. three-ply belt...

Johnnie was one of the most inventive little cubs that ever grew up in a machine shop. He would much rather spend a day in inventing ways to do something that nobody wanted done than to devote an hour or so to doing something useful. This does not mean that Johnnie was lazy or sought to shirk his share of whatever was doing. He was a bright, active lad, with an aptitude for mechanics...

Standing in one corner, and covered with the rust and dirt of ages, was another relic--the governor from a remote predecessor of the shining, business-like, 200-hp. Wheelock engine that was now running the factory. It was a tall ungainly thing, with "fly-balls" that would make very creditable shot for a trench mortar in a modern war, but Johnnie couldn't bear to see it standing there in the corner just going to waste.

After a week of feverish activity with much running back and forth between the machine and blacksmith shops, Johnnie invited us out to the blacksmith shop....

Because of my proficiency in scraping and polishing, acquired during my eight months' experience at Baldwin's upon handrail parts for locomotives (of which kind of work I had become very tired), the first job handed me in my next place of employment was the scraping and polishing of a lot of change gears for lathes. This was in the shop of Bement & Dougherty, builders of heavy machine tools, located on Callowhill St. in Philadelphia.

The gears were what are called "web" gears; that is, they had no spokes, even in the largest diameters...

The lathe on which the polishing was done was located in a dark corner of the shop so that I was obliged to light the gas (a welcome improvement over the old whale-oil lamps I had known)...



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