Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Something A Little Different...

There are many parallels in my little universe, but the majority always lead to something mechanical in nature.  Something that is a common topic here is the beauty of old machinery.  One breed of machine that I've only briefly talked about here, is that of the tower clock movement.

Mechanical Craftsmanship - Tower Clock Movements

Over the past couple years, I have been volunteering my time to help restore one of these lovely machines in our little town for the old Courthouse.  The clock was built by A.S. Hotchkiss under the Seth Thomas Company and was constructed in 1876.  The clock is a model #12A. The clock featured a time and strike train that was wound by hand once a week until an electric unit was fit into the existing clock movement frame in the mid 1940's.  During its life, the clock has seen time periods of functional issues and lack of maintenance, ultimately preventing it from keeping time, striking the bell, or functioning at all.  It now needs a great deal of attention, including reconstructing missing wheels/gears, redoing the clock dials, and even some internal structural repairs to the building itself.  There's a long road ahead, but the county, help from our community, and mentoring from tower clock expert, Phil Wright from the Tower Clock Company, will keep me in-line and will be doing a portion of the restoration as well.

Here's what it looks like now.  I'll post some updates as this gets further along.







Tuesday, May 9, 2017

the Baker Torpedo - Electric Streamlined Racing Came Early

HUGE thanks to my good friend Andrew for showing me this car.  What an amazing accomplishment for the early 1900's and proving what power electric cars could have on the race car.  Can you imagine driving a car capable of 120 mph in 1902?  Incredible.

Read about the car on the Old Motor...

Baker Torpedo






Friday, May 5, 2017

Friday Feature Presentation - Jim Cowden's Home Built Aluminum GT40

Sorry for the delay in posting!  The usual life insanity has about crippled this blogger.  I'm working through it, though.  don't give up on me.

Thanks for the reminder from Chris Meurett and his employees at PowerStream to keep the ball rolling!  I appreciate the nice words!

Okay...  enough of that.  How about a movie?

I'm a long time lover of the GT40!  You know...  the ones that gave Ferrari a taste of good 'ol American racing at Le Mans in 1966 through 1969 with a 1-2-3 in 1966.  But this isn't about one of those cars.  This blog LOVES those cars and will certainly talk more about those later...

This blog has always been about the support of the, "if you can't buy it, build it!" attitude.  So check out Jim Cowden's INCREDIBLE 15,000 hour build!  The details are incredible and this is FAR from being some kind of kit car.