Dr Lary Shaffer SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor

With deep sadness and great reluctance, I applied for an early retirement incentive and left the college and the Plattsburgh area in the Fall of 2002. I now live in coastal Maine where I am President and CEO of a furniture and cabinetry company: Scarborough Marsh Fine Furniture.

Before you jump to the conclusion that I have developed high level management skills since you last saw me, I should point out that I am the only employee of my company.

If you need to contact me, I will occasionally check my Plattsburgh email: lawrence.shaffer@plattsburgh.edu If you send me an email, be sure that your name is in the subject line or is recognizable from the sender designation. I do not even open emails from people with sender names such as buffbutt@hotmail.com unless there is some evidence that it is from someone I know.

I was an undergraduate at Plattsburgh from 1964 to 1968. During that time, I was very lucky to be mentored by Dr. Henry Morlock and Dr. Noel Smith. I doubt that I would have made it through my undergraduate years without the unfailing camaraderie of my roommate Jamie Herrick. Jamie was also a psychology major and we tackled the curriculum together. I met Tom Bromley and Al Howard at breakfast on my first morning in Plattsburgh and we still hang out when we get the chance.

From Plattsburgh, I went to Oxford University and earned my doctorate in Zoology working under the Nobel Laureate Niko Tinbergen. After some years making TV documentaries, I returned to Plattsburgh in 1976. I was fortunate to land back in the Psychology Department. The outstanding scholars in the Psychology Department embody the supreme standard for intelligence, collegiality, civility, and warmth. Over the years, I got to know some of the members of the department very well--often owing to chance factors such as office proximity. Others I knew less well, but I count all the department members, past and present, as friends. There are not many work situations like that.

By a somewhat conservative estimate, I taught about 15,000 students in classes during my Plattsburgh career. For 19 years I addressed upwards to 1000 new admits on their first evening on campus. For many years I also addressed new students and their families in summer orientation. I was the commencement speaker at the college three times. For years I coordinated the Freshman Experience Program with Cheryl Hogle. I was proud that Bill Laundry (at that time the Dean of Students), the fine people in his office, and the Residence Staff Association always treated me as an honorary member of their teams. While I was teaching, I co-authored two psychology textbooks, one with Matt Merrens. Matt and I have been close friends for years and we had a terrific time teaching together. I wrote the other book with Alan Morrison, who at that time, was a very talented undergraduate student. After Plattsburgh Alan did a number of things and is now a highly skilled professional computer geek. I edited four books of reprinted developmental psychology journal articles with another highly talented undergrad, Josh Duntley. Back when Josh and I worked together we co-designed a new teaching approach to go with the books. Subsequently Josh went on to earn a doctorate from the University of Texas and is now a college professor. Josh has now taken over as first author of the introductory psychology book that Matt Merrens and I wrote.

I shared hundreds of miles of academic discussions during early morning bike rides with Bryan Hartman. Former Plattsburgh Vice President and Provost Tom Moran and I were undergraduates together and his friendship and support always kept me on track. I shared many inspirational discussions with Professors Dave Mowry, Rich Robbins and Doug Skopp. These guys also joined me in wonderful sessions of laughing until I could not sit up straight. Our department secretary, Judy Dashnaw, kept me sane. Looking at all this, it is obvious that I had an academic career of enormous privilege. I will always be thankful for opportunities such as these. Borrowing a phrase from the late Dan Fogelberg, coming to Plattsburgh was, for me, the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance.

I miss all the wonderful colleagues and friends I made among the faculty, students and staff. I consider myself lucky indeed to have worked so long at a place where there are so many dedicated and hardworking people. I worked pretty hard myself, but I had quite a bit of fun. I loved the college.

When I got my computer upgraded a while back, the software that I was using for my college website, Dreamweaver, had to be replaced by a new version. I cannot understand the fricking thing, even with the "Dummies" book for the new Dreamweaver. (Stupidly) fooling around with this website, I lost the whole thing, with all its outdated and useless information about my time at the college.

Because the rest of this is new, it probably has typos. I will clean them up as fast as I can.

Instead of replacing all my old course policies and stuff like that, I thought I would focus on my current life. I will leave my bicycle stuff available. People do still ask me for advice about long bike trips because I biked across the country in 1987. I once told my friend Professor of History Doug Skopp that history is bunk. Nevertheless, I find myself once again doing history. I don't know to what extent I am permitted to use this site talk about a new research project that interests me. Let's try it and we will both find out:

Rebuilding a Sheffield No 1 Railroad Handcar

This could be a long boring story. If you are not up for that, I would go somewhere else. Of course I don't think it is boring. However, that is my wife's opinion. And it's not just her.

When I was a kid in upstate New York, maybe 12 years-old, childhood buddies John Hine and Tom Loveday and I used to hike along the rails of our local short line railroad, the Fonda, Johnstown and Gloversville RR Co. It was a friendly little railroad, where the train personel would wave and blow the horn, rather than call the cops. One day while we were taking a rest next to the collapsing Broadablin section house, I noticed some rusty metal in the grass. It was the remains of an old railroad handcar with the wood mostly rotted away and the metal spread out like a dinosaur skeleton.

I went to the railroad offices and they sold me the pile of scrap iron for $2. I wish that I had been smart enough to take pictures of it before I moved anything, but, after all, I was a jerky 12 year-old kid. My dad kindly drove to Broadalbin in the station wagon and helped me load the metal into the car. I scrounged some pieces of track from a local leather mill and rebult the handcar with lumber yard 2 X 4s as best I could with hand tools and my 12 year-old skills. It worked. Friends and I played on it in the yard. I grew up and left home. The handcar sat outdoors for about 25 years until I had a home of my own with a cellar where I could store the parts. By then the lumber yard wood had rotted and I was almost back where I had started in Broadalbin.

I had always thought of my hand car as THE handcar of the F .J. & G. which shows that I don't know much about railroads. F. J. & G. expert Paul Larner tells me that the F. J. & G. Steam Division had six working section gangs with no less than one handcar each. The Electric Division had seven sections with at least one handcar each. Western Union workers had their own hand cars. In addition to that there were some extra track gangs that had their own handcars. In short, mine was not the only one. This is not mine riding on the F. J. & G. train in 1938 because this one has steel wheels. Paul also kindly dug out the other old F. J. and G. pictures that I am using here.

Here is another picture that Paul supplied. It shows New York Central locomotive quite a ways from home in the West Yard of the F. J. & G. in Gloversville. In the foreground there are three handcars that look to be retired. They have no wooden pump handles and they appear to have weeds growing up through them. Behind them there were probably several more rows of handcars if this was the F. J. & G.'s handcar graveyard. Luckily mine escaped the scrap pile that was probably the fate of these three. Motor cars had replaced some handcars by this time. Paul says that in 1928 the F. J. & G had 3 motor cars, 12 handcars and 13 pushcars. The handcars were valued at $50 new.

Fast forward 50 + years after I first found the handcar. I have moved a couple of times and I am now living in coastal Maine. Each time I moved, I faithfully moved the handcar parts intending one day to rebuilt it. On a bike ride I happened to meet a professional associated with the Maine Central Railroad Mountain Division Trail. It is a state rail-trail that still has the rails on it. She told me that I would be allowed to run my handcar on those rails. Coincidentally, I have become a cabinetmaker and I also do some welding to make parts for some of my furniture. My handcar needed both woodwork and welding. I have the shop and the equipment to rebuild my handcar and to do it right. All I need is some time. Time? Holy crap. I have been waiting for this opportunity for 50 years. I guess I can find some time here and there.

lcsweld

The first thing I did was to hit the internet to see what I could find out. Almost my first find there was Mason Clark's handcar site. Mason is a thoroughly amazing man. As a high school student he has built a number of handcars that are beautiful. He is very knowledgeable about handcars in general and he has helped me a great deal. From the material on his website, I quickly identified my handcar as a Sheffield No. 1. It was made by the Sheffield Velocipede Company, later the Sheffield Car Company, a Division of Fairbanks Morse. The company was located in Three Rivers Michigan. Here is one of the patents that cover aspects of my handcar. The origin of the handcar as an object is murky. It is a story that I plan to pursue at some point. As far as I can find, there was not ONE inventor of THE handcar. From the birth of railroads, highly skilled machinists in railroad shops spent a great deal of time working on steam engines where the conversion of reciprocaing motion to rotary motion was right in their faces. One would have to be a complete idiot not to imagine a small hand-powered vehicle that would use the same principle. Far from being idiots, many of these men were mechanical geniuses and it is almost certain that they started to build handcars.

The earliest mention that I can find of people riding on a hand-operated railcar was in 1832, when Henry Clay, who eventually served in important roles such as Congressman, Senator and Secretary of State, had a ride on a flat pushcar belonging to a railroad running from Lake Ponchartrain to New Orleans. The railroad was five miles long and might have been the first railroad in the USA to employ T shaped rail. The car had wooden wheels made of pecan. The car was polled by six carpenters. "greatly to the amusement and gratification of Mr. Clay."

Although it is not known for sure, it is likely that the first mechanically powered handcars did not use reciprocating motion to achieve rotary motion. Rather they had various sorts of rotary devices where the section crew drivers turned big cranks. Some of these used gears to transmit power and some used belts or chains. Various ratcheting safety handles were patented so that when rolling down hill the riders would not get their teeth knocked out as the cranks flew around on their own.

This is the earliest picture I have found so far of a real handcar. It is a crank handcar from an 1851 issue of Scientific American that was found for me by railroad section car expert Leon Sapp.

The handcar that is most familiar to people now involves a walking beam. That is one of the names that is given to the horizontal metal arm that gets pumped to drive the handcar. The walking beam sits upon a wooden structure called the gallows frame. This walking beam is pumped up and down and the reciprocating motion is transferred by a connecting rod to a cranked shaft attached to a big gear. This drive gear engages a small pinion gear on one of the axles. The earliest image that I know of showing one of these handcars is this patent from 1859.

Although this car has a double walking beam, the drive train basics are the same as on later handcars. This patent was mainly concerned with a foot operated treadle-assist to the power provided by the walking beam.

As I have said, the origins of the handcar are unclear, but my interpretation of this patent is that by 1859, the walking beam and drive train basics were in such common use that they were not patentable. I am continuing to do research into the early history of the handcar and if I find out anything else, I will report back. I have developed an unhealthy obsession with handcar patents.

If you are not familiar with the drive mechanism of the walking beam handcar, there is a little YouTube video of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDdp8sh4G3U

The viedo suffers in accuracy a bit because the drive gear driven by the walking beam crank should be much larger than the pinion gear which is on the axle, but it is correct in spirit.

Here is a well-known picture of a handcar taking part in the building of the Central Pacific Railroad. It was taken at Citadel Rock Wyoming in 1868 by Andrew J. Russel, photogtapher of the Transcontinental Railroad project. Handcars must have been essential to the completion of this incredible piece of engineering. Railroad-Union Pacific-Construction Photo File, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

Here is a walking beam handcar and a crank handcar outside the offices of the Jackson and Sharp company in Wilmington Delaware. Jackson and Sharp made all sorts of railroad cars, freight and passenger. They were known for the high quality of their work. The finish details inside and outside of their cars were superb. Although no one in the picture looks too excited, it is a reasonable surmise that these handcars were also built to the highest standard. The date is unknown. Photograph courtesy of the friendly and helpful Delware Public Archives.

I have collected over 270 patents relating to handcars. If you have any interest in mechanical things, you might enjoy looking at a few of them here. I have chosen one crank car and several that display the ingenuity of inventors in finding new ways to achieve rotary motion at the wheels with a walking beam driver. There were also lots of patents for devices that had levers that were perpendicular to the deck of the car and were pulled back and forth to achieve power. Perhaps I will post some of those eventually. I do not know if any of these five patented handcars were ever actually built. If not, someone spent a great deal of time thinking it through anyway.

In this one the central rod (G) pistons up and down when the car is driven. It would be important to keep one's fingers well away from exposed drive gears "E" while this car was in motion.

drivere

This one is trickier than it first appears. The center point of the walking beam slides up and down, rather than being in a fixed position. Although I have a hard time imagining it, I think the path of the wooden handles at the ends walking beam might be more straight up and down, rather than following the gentle arc of other walking beam handles.

This one has a ring-gear on the axle and it looks quite clever to me.

This one, like many other handcar patents I have seen, has ratchets in the drive gear so that the gear only moves in one direction and idles when the power from the walking beam is moving backwards, winding up for another power stroke. I guess the effect upon the drivers would be that one side would be easy to pull up and the other side would be easy to push down.

drivera

The workings of this one are too obvious to need description.

Here is one old patented handcar that apparently was built. Adrian Michigan, where this handcar company was located, has a long railroad history. It was one terminal of the Erie & Kalamazoo Railroad, the first railroad to be operated west of the Alleghenies. In 1836 a horse-drawn car made the first trip from Toledo to Adrian on this railroad made of iron straps nailed to oak rails. In 1837 the line acquired a steam locomotive. Passengers had to de-train to scavenge for firewood and water when needed. The Adrian Patent Hand-Car company was organized in the early 1870s. Patent holder James D. Hinckley was one of the principals of the company. Circa 1872 a "high speed section handcar" fitted with Hinckley's double crank gear cost $80.00. A regular single crank car was also available from Adrian for $75.00. Adrian offered to sell patterns "at a reasonable price" so that railroads could produce their own handcars with the Hinckley Patent gearing.

Now, back to the story of rebuilding my old handcar. One of the first things I needed for my handcar rebuilding project was wood. On a trip to Old Mystic Seaport with my high school chum Jack Keene, we saw a gigantic chain saw mill operating. I was already thinking about handcar wood at that point and seeing this mill in operation reminded me that years ago I had bought a little chain saw mill from a catalog for my own chain saw. When it arrived it looked so pathetic and puny that I never actually used it. Emboldened by the Mystic Seaport experience, I dug this little Alaska Mill out of a bunch of other hopeless junk that I had been carrying around for years. I re-filed an old saw chain at 90 degrees across the saw's bar to make a rip chain. The first cut is made by screwing a board to the log to create a flat surface for the mill to follow.

After that, the mill slides along the flat area created by the first cut. I cut down a couple of maple trees from my own woods and sawed them up. To my astonishment, it made pretty good slabs. My friends Terry and Wiil Bergen showed up at just the right time (for me and the wrong time for them). They helped me saw some of my maple and man-haul it our of the woods. Right after I took this picture I painted the slab ends with some old exterior latex paint in order to prevent rapid drying and cracking at the ends of the slabs. I left them outdoors for several months during the spring and into the summer, covering them with a tarp when it looked like rain and uncovering them afterwards.

In July, my daughter Grace and I horsed them up into the loft over my shop. They were still extremely heavy because of their moisture content and it is a wonder that neither Grace nor I was killed in this process. That loft is as hot as all bloody hell in the summer because it is uninsulated and the sun beats down on its dark grey roof. While it is not a professional dry kiln it is the next best thing. It also had the virtue that it was free (unless you add in the risk that Grace and I might easily have been squashed like bugs trying to get the wood up there.)

After a summer of cooking in the loft, I brought them down. This was much easier because they were down to about 10% moisture content and much lighter. I squared them up with the planer. I racked them up on a high shelf in my shop so that they could adjust to their new dimensions. Sometimes directly after planing, wood will twist or bow because some fibers that were holding it straight have been removed. I will gradually plane these new square pieces down to the sizes required for the handcar. They are the thick white pieces sharing the rack with wood for my work. Work? Oh, I forgot, I guess I am supposed to be working too...

In the rebuild of the handcar that I did as a kid, the most difficult part was to make new wooden centers to replace the rotted ones in the wheels. I had some hand tools and each wheel took a long time to make. A local factory, Peters Toy Company, kindly gave me some thick planed ash to use in the wheel rebuilding. In those days one could easily get creosote, a superior wood preservative that otherwise wrought havoc on people and the environment. We did not know better in those days so I soaked the wheel wood in creosote. The result is that those wheel centers have lasted well while the handcar waited for me to get back to it.

I am sure, right about now, you are asking yourself why in that old picture, above of the handcar in my back yard in the winter, the handcar seems to have a steel wheel on the left. The answer is that when I collected up the scrap metal in Broadalbin there were only three wooden wheels. Somewhere along the way one wooden wheel must have been damaged and the railroad boys put on a steel one to replace it. I had always planned to do something about it and now I found myself with the tools and skills necessary to take that on. First I marked out the part of the steel wheel that needed to be cut away.

Then I torched the steel center out of the wheel. Next, I had to heat up the rim and flatten it out. Because of the design of that wheel, the rim was dished in. Luckily I own an anvil that was given to me years ago by my dear friends Bill Laundry and Cheryl Hogle. I think of them whenever I use the anvil, which is quite often.

This is the new wooden wheel I made out of the old steel one. I am pretty pleased with it. While working on it I thought back to my youthful efforts to rebuild the others. Each spoke had to be cut out with hand tools. It took me weeks to make the wooden centers for those three wheels. A single spoke took more than an hour to craft. With my current shop, I could easily buzz out 20 spokes in an hour.

The axles for this handcar are 1 1/2" thick solid steel. When I got a close look at them I discovered that they were both bent in several places. The drive axle was quite severely bent. How did this happen? If the railroad boys had to move whole sticks of rail, they sometimes hung them from the axles with chains, greased the chains a little and carried the rail that way, hanging under the handcar. My friend Jack Keene thinks he remembers that the F. J. & G. RR used 70 pound rail. That means it was 70 lbs per yard. A full stick of rail was 39 feet, so we are getting near a half ton per stick. That might bend the ol' axles. Acting on Mason Clark's suggestion, I bent them back with a homemade press I had built for something else.

Because the axles had been used in the bent condition for quite a while, the bearing points on the axles were worn into a spindle shape. In order to true them up a bit I welded up a shopmade axle lathe. Mc Master Carr, suppliers of almost everything in the world, provided me with a V belt pully that could slide onto an axle and be tightened in place. At each end of the lathe there is a little post that has a hard steel center punch through it. The point of the center punch goes into an original lathe hole in the end of the axle. I held a file against the bearing points and I was able to square them up quite a bit. This, by the way, is how I discovered that the axles were bent: I put the drive axle in the lathe first and when I turned on the motor the axle wobbled so severely that it nearly became airborne.

While I was lucky to find almost all of the handcar parts, I was missing three of the covers for the axle pillow blocks, Sheffield part no. 169. The one I had is far right in the picture. I took it to Mike up the road a piece at the Auburn Stove Foundry and he used it as a pattern to make me three brand new ones. At the time, they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen, with apologies to my wife and daughters. I had been worrying about how to solve this problem for 50 years. Well, not continuously but on and off.

The next problem involved the wheel bearings that go into these pillow blocks. In the pile of handcar pieces in the weeds there was one bronze bearing. It was worn to a frazzle. Where does one go to get bronze bearings for one's 130 year old handcar? Amazon, of course. One day it occurred to me to see if Amazon had anything that would do. They have some surprising things, I knew that. Among those things were pages and pages of big bronze bearings. I found some that were the correct length and the correct outside diameter. For the inside diameter, I measured the well-worn bearing points on my axles and I was chuffed to find just the correct bearing to accommodate the wear.. They were $8 each. In 1922, Sheffield sold them for 40 cents. Inflation can be outrageous.

All I had to do was to saw the bearings in half. Here is the completed pillow block (upside down compared to its position on the handcar.) On Amazon I also found bronze bearings for the shafts at each end of the big drive gear. They were a perfect fit as well.

Next, I decided to build a mock-up of the drive train in my shop. I did ths to locate the positions of the drive train elements. Mason Clark had sent me Sheffield's measured drawing for the No. 1 handcar and some other drawings he had. Something was wrong somewhere.

In my first rebuild in about 1958 I had used the dimensions that I took from the rotted wood frame that came with the handcar. The gallows frame for my handcar was angled at 30 degrees. I still have the wooden top piece, so I am sure of that. The top of the gallows frame had not rotted because there was so much oil on it from the rock boxes that support the walking beam. The actual angle of Sheffield gallows frames should be more like 21 degrees: much steeper. You can see the difference easily in the pictures. The angles of my gallows frame members are quite a bit more relaxed than in the Sheffield picture. My 30 degree angles made my handcar wheel base significntly longer and, also made the deck much bigger.

It is my opinion that the F. J & G. railroad boys rebuilt my handcar at some point with the specific goal of making it bigger.. Sheffield made a bigger handcar, the No. 2 Special, but it had a longer walking beam. My handcar has the shorter walking beam so I think it was born as a No. 1. In this rebuild of the handcar I am going to go back to the original Sheffield No. 1 blueprint dimensions.

My next task was to set up a working mock-up of the drive train. That way I could try out the steeper gallows frame and find the dimensions of the spatial relationships between the elements of the drive train. The pivot point of the walking beam has to be in the center of the top of the gallows frame, so that is a given. After that, I put the drive train pieces in one at a time, drilling them into the mock-up frame as I went.

I discovered another problem or two on the way. The drive wheels are supposed to be keyed to the axles with a square key in a slot. When I got the handcar as a kid, there were no keys and one drive wheel was rust-welded onto the axle. It seems that the F. J. & G. boys had been using it like that with only one drive wheel fixed to the axle (with rust) and the other one just spinning free. The spinning one has worn so much of the taper out of its hub, that it can slide right over the bearing point when the axle is not in place. I will have to do something about that and I have not figured out just what. Leon Sapp has suggested a fiber sleeve of the sort used on rail motor cars to keep them from tripping signals. Also the keyways in the axle look as if they were cut by someone with a hammer and a cold chisel. I had to custom make odd tapered keys for them because the keyways are so irregular.

Railroads are typically, in my experience, covered in grease and oil. I know that the old Fonda, Johnstown and Gloversville Railroad was no different because as a kid I routinely got all covered with grease climbing around on the railroad's equipment. I guess probably the only places on the entire railroad that were not covered in grease and oil were the bearings of the handcar assigned to the section house near the little village of Broadalbin. They were dry as a bone and clean as a whistle. It must have been terrifically hard work to use that thing in its last days, with one drive wheel and no axle bearings left. What is this about? In the section house 10 feet away there was almost certainly some oil. Probably buckets of oil.

Paul Larner tells me that the Broadalbin line, leased until 1930, generally received the hand-me-downs from the the rest of the railroad. Any story that I might tell about the working history of my handcar is pure speculation. However it is pretty easy to imagine that the Broadalbin boys had this shagged-out old handcar and when the motor cars became available they were eager to get rid of their hard-rolling handcar. They set it in the grass beside their section house. Over time, as the weeds grew taller and the handcar dissolved it was forgotten. That saved its life.

When my shop mock-up of the drive train was finished, tt was a thrilling sight to see the mock-up running so many years after it last operated. My kid Alice took a little video of it and it is on YouTube.

As a handcar expert of considerable gravitas Mason Clark thinks that my handcar may be a particularly early Sheffield. While the wooden wheels were offered for years as an option they may suggest early manufacture. Also, later cars were more typically fitted with roller bearings. Mason says that this change happened around 1890. Further, the walkling beam on my handcar is what he describes as a "Play Doh" walking beam. It looks like it was made of that substance then hardened. It looks like that because it was probalby made by some guy standing at a forge, hitting it with hammers and welding it in the fire. It looks very hand made. If you look at the eyes for the wooden handle on one end, you can see that they are not very symmmetrical, although they have been twisted arround so that they are in line with each other.

TO BE CONTINUED...