Rusty Bowtie
General Category => General Discussion - Intros => Topic started by: sammons on November 05, 2021, 12:32:32 PM
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Engle Coach Shop Mt. This guy was commisioned to build exact replica 3 pc wagon set. Does pretty much everything in house, impressive. This is a short version of main wagons. Boy..there were heavy built.
Link
https://youtu.be/z9sy770g8EM
An old friend of mine took on repairing wagons/buggy's after retiring. He told me about this guy years ago. Insted of watching the depressing news...i've been binge watching his Youtube channel. If you are interested, he has video of each step in detail including the water wagon.
I've been going to stop in to the Boron visitors center on my trips to my brothers, but always seem to be thru there in the middle of the night.
Originals and new relica's
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Very cool! Looks like the one I saw at Death Valley.
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Tom i believe your pic and mine are one of the originals at the Harmony Mine.
My curiosity internet search of how may were made....
Looks like originally 5 sets of wagons built at $900 each wagon. Confusing/conflicting info.... One set was reproduced in 1940 and one set in 2016. One complete intact set at Harmony in Death Valley with running gear of others. One artical said there was only one original set still pulling around, but never said where. Another artical said only one original set left intact at Harmony.🥴
The pic Tom and i posted is original in Harmony, i've seen pics of a set pulling that is white painted (all 3 peices). Pic of the new set with just the water tank white?
Ahh, the internet....where you can't get a straight answer🙄
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Thanks for posting this. I've always been a Death Valley Days fan partly because of the shots of the wagons at the beginning, end, & in many episodes. Watching the 20 mule teams, 18 mule 2 horse, work fascinates me. At a time I could drive a six-up but that is nothing like a jerk line. In 1967-1972 I worked for and hung out with the guys that ran a tourist stage coach line in Columbia California. Along with breaking & training horses we maintained a fleet of original coaches. In my time there we built one from almost scratch. We ordered wheel kits from the Amish but fitted & assembled them in our shop. We had a 3rd generation California blacksmith/wheelwright. Vern was in his mid 60s and once he showed us how to make bolts, nuts, & washers he allowed us to buy them from the hardware store in black, non galvanized! Every other iron/steel & wood piece was made in the shop. The same with all the repairs on the old coaches. Our shop was not a well equipped as that one. After the owner sold the stage line to another friend he and two of the guys built stage coaches until about ten years ago when the shop burned down. Since they were all in their 80s they retired. One of them now lives in Carson City. The other two drive over from Sonora a few times a year and we all meet for breakfast. Zane the old owner is 97! I learned more from that outfit than in all my schooling.
I think the painted wagons are light blue with red wheels. When I first went to Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley there was a complete set of wagons in pretty good shape there. Maybe those were the 1940 replicas and possibly the ones used in the TV show.? There was another set at the Harmony Borax Works. There were pieces around at several places. At one point I saw a set in Mojave which was the railroad terminus for the wagons. Can you imagine how hot the water in the tanker would get if it were not painted? In the old pictures it doesn't look as light and I think the early ones were wood. There were also some very large ore wagons used in this area to haul the ore from the mines around Virginia City to the processing mills along the Carson River.
I'm going to watch the entire series, Thanks!
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Sixball, thats cool you had the opportunity to do that. I've always liked simple mechanical things, what makes them tick and how did they do that. Lol, you mentioned making bolts. One of my dads first real jobs was at Ark Valley Mfg, (farm implements) they had a lathe operator quit and they asked dad if he could run one. He had been watching alot, said sure. He was making bolts/ nuts for a plow. The only nut that would fit his bolts were one offs that he made. Farmers use to complain about not being able to find the right nut when they lost one😁
Engel is pretty amazing to me. Blacksmith, Wheelwright, Coachbuilder, Upholsterer, Painter/pinstriper.
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One of the things that struck me was the order of the steps used to create a piece. Some of it seemed backwards to me. Vern had several huge draw blocks maybe 18" square and 4-6" thick. Each had lots of holes and each hole had a purpose. One had tapered holes and by drawing metal through the right holes in the right order he could form tubing from flat stock. One block formed carriage bolts by driving hot round stock into a hole that was shaped to form an end for threading, a shank a little later fo a tight fit in wood, a square head to bite in and keep it from turning, and the rounded top cap that kept it from pilling through the hole. We threaded everything by hand. I often wondered how the draw blocks were made. He had more of them than we ever used. Much of what we did was in the small shop in Columbia, California State Park. All of the tooling was Vern's.
He made only square nuts. He started with a bar hand cut from a larger plate a little narrower than the width the nut would be. He measured and center punched for the holes. While red hot he punched the holes through the bar. If making a lot of nuts he would mark and punch the whole plate. Then we threaded them. They were heated again and cut into squares using a cutting block fitted in the anvil. This process makes nuts that have a dimpled hole and the sides are clearly cut. If doing a large number each strip was cut from the plate while hot with a chisel. This is one process where I would have spent hours more messing with a lot of little square pieces trying to make holes and thread them. Vern worked fast and it took all I had to keep up. One of the most fun days in my life was at Vern's house helping put up his winter firewood using his black powder splitter. My son is getting into blacksmithing now. I wish he could spend the time with Vern that I did.