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An unusual heirloom


Joe Frickin' Friday

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Joe Frickin' Friday

Most of you have probably never heard of American LaFrance. But if you are a firefighter, you likely know that they made fire trucks, possibly even the ones in your firehouse. Unfortunately they closed their doors for good a couple of years ago, but for about 100 years before that, they made fire trucks – and for forty years before that, they were making horse-drawn fire wagons.

 

I'm not a firefighter; I came to know of ALF through a different route. When my dad got out of the Navy in the early 1960s, his first civilian job was as an engineer with American LaFrance in Elmira, New York. As I was growing up, he sometimes talked about the engineering considerations of firetruck design, or told interesting stories about things that had happened on the job. One of his more amusing work-related stories had to do with the development of an airport crash tender. Unlike the typical city fire truck, this was a vehicle that might be expected to go off-road to respond to airplane crashes away from roadways, so of course the designers wanted good power-to-weight ratio to be able to get across sandy/muddy/hilly ground without bogging down. The solution? A gas turbine engine. Not to provide jet thrust, mind you, but to provide mechanical power to turn the drive wheels. Hey, this was the jet age after all, so why the hell not? I'm imagining a truck probably similar to this one (albeit with bigger tires and all-wheel drive):

 

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note the upward-facing turbine exhaust a few feet behind the cab)

 

On paper it sounded good; it's hard to beat a gas turbine for power-to-weight. Out in the field though, the results were less impressive, owing primarily to the turbine's long spool-up time. When you get to a sandy/muddy patch, you want power NOW, so you stomp on the gas – and five seconds later, AFTER you've bogged down, the turbine starts giving you several hundred horsepower, spinning the wheels in place and burying the truck up to the axles.

 

The solution that test drivers resorted to was to simply keep their foot on the accelerator pedal (to keep the engine spooled up), and just drag the brakes to control speed. Hit a sandy patch? No problem, take your foot off of the brake and you immediately have all the power you could want. Never mind that this kept the brakes smoldering hot all the time.

 

So one day Dad was along for the ride during an off-road field test of one of these trucks, during which the driver was really taxing the brakes. Dad warned the driver a few times that he was going to boil the brakes, but the driver continued hammering forward – until finally a brake line ruptured, spewing brake fluid all over the drum and creating an unsettling cloud of smoke. Apparently for this handling test the truck was not actually outfitted for suppressing fires, so there wasn't much they could do other than stand back and wait. Thankfully the tire didn't catch fire, so they didn't lose the truck, but it was a tense few minutes before the smoke died down. :grin:

 

Anyway, in 1964, ALF was in the process of switching their Elmira factory from making wooden ladders to making metal ones. This meant a massive tooling change, including getting rid of hundreds of feet of heavy-duty industrial workbench. Dad asked if he could have a chunk of workbench with a vise attached to it. The agreed-upon price?

 

$3. :grin:

 

But the chunk he wanted was an integral portion of a much longer workbench. Solution? Get a saw and start sawing. In the end, Dad came home with 11 feet of industrial workbench with a massive Charles Parker vise on one end.

 

The bench moved along with my family to Erie, Pennsylvania in 1968, and I was born a couple of years later. Starting from when I was barely old enough to see over the top of it, this workbench was where I learned intensive bicycle maintenance, woodworking/carpentry, built model rockets, and engaged in various other hare-brained projects you might expect from the son of an engineer; it's covered with paint, glue, solvent stains, and more than a few drill holes and saw scars from yours truly. Over the years, the workbench repeatedly moved with my family – to Madison, Wisconsin; New Brighton, Minnesota; and Broomfield, Colorado.

 

This spring my parents sold their house and moved to an independent-living retirement community, requiring a major downsizing of their household goods. The workbench needed a new home, and I was only too happy to oblige. No self-respecting shop rat would ever turn down a nice big horizontal work surface like that, and besides – as you might have guessed by now – I have considerable sentimental attachment to it.

 

The only question was how to get it from Colorado to Michigan. :confused: A one-way U-haul truck rental together with one-way airfare would have been insanely expensive and would have required several days of precious vacation time.

 

In the end, I found uShip. You list your shipping requirements, shippers bid on the job, and you accept whatever bid you want. Discussion with bidders is allowed, so you can establish that they'll be able to meet your specific needs, whatever they may be. I listed the workbench, and accepted a $350 bid from Bob Blanke, a guy in Colorado with a truck and a LOOOONG trailer who happens to travel a lot and takes shipping jobs to help cover his costs.

 

So in early April, my sister and brother-in-law took the workbench apart and helped Bob load his trailer at my parents' house. By late April, Bob's travel schedule brought him to my house in Michigan, with the workbench in tow:

 

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Did I mention Bob has a helluva long trailer? :grin: Whatever, it was definitely the right tool for hauling those 11-foot-long planks cross-country. Bob was a nice fellow, and the whole thing with uShip worked perfectly; I would happily do business with either one of them again.

 

Getting the pieces from Bob's trailer into the garage was the easy part:

 

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Masako helped with the hard part, i.e. getting the pieces down into the basement. Our basement staircase features a 90-degree turn, and some of those pieces are LONG and HEAVY!

 

At the end of July I was finally able to clear a space in the basement to actually assemble the bench. First thing was getting the legs in position:

 

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Stickers from multiple moves on one of the legs. This workbench is well-traveled:

 

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First heavy plank in place:

 

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The wide, thin center plank had a long crack in it, all the way through, so before I installed it I had to glue it back together:

 

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The table appeared to have been originally assembled with square nuts, but over the years, several of those square nuts apparently got lost and were replaced with conveniently available hex nuts. Also, there were only a few washers used (just on the vise bolts). I happened to have a bunch of 1/2” washers in my junk drawer just waiting for their day in the sun, and I also went out and hunted down a bunch of square nuts to replace the mish-mash of hex nuts.

 

Before:

 

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After:

 

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After getting the third top plank in place, and the shelves, and bolting it all together, it was finally ready for use:

 

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In all my years I had never noticed the uneven ends of the workbench until Dad mentioned them during a visit last month. This is from where the workbench was hand-sawed to free it up from the much longer factory workbench:

 

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The construction of the work surface is interesting:

 

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The wide center plank is relatively thin, but it's supported by a beam running its length, with a short crossmember above each leg unit that's shimmed for leveling and height adjustment. Meanwhile, the front and rear planks are 2.25 inches thick, weighing in at maybe 50 pounds each. This puts the expensive/thick timbers where they're most needed, while saving cost with thinner wood in the middle. :thumbsup:

 

Given the workbench's roots in the American LaFrance factory in Elmira, it seemed appropriate to pay homage to that fact. After poking around online, I found this and bought it:

 

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This is a photograph of the radiator emblem on a American LaFrance fire truck. The maker attached the photo to a steel plate to make it suitable for hanging on a wall. If it looks funny, that's because it's still in the original plastic wrapping. It's pretty, but after it arrived, two things bothered me about it:

 

  • It really was just a photograph; it wasn't the real thing.
  • Based on its appearance, this was likely from a truck made in the early 1900s, kind of a mismatch for the vintage of the workbench.

So I sent it back, and did some more poking around online. Dad got this bench in 1964, so I tracked down this picture of a 1964 American LaFrance 900 series pumper truck:

 

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Note the emblem writ large on its face:

 

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Turns out there's all kinds of antique firefighting memorabilia available for purchase out there. If you want, you can even buy your own used fire truck. That would have been a bit much for what I had in mind, but whaddyaknow, I was able to find that exact emblem for sale on eBay, and pretty soon I was holding it in my hand:

 

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When the emblem arrived, the chrome was a little scratched and pitted, and the black paint inside the letters was also pretty weathered and scratched up. So I went about restoring it just a bit.

 

First step, polish the chrome with a couple of buffing wheels and a couple of different sizes of grit::

 

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Second step, use masking tape to mask off the lettering so the black paint can be sandblasted away and repainted:

 

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This was a big job, actually. The letters are recessed into the emblem by maybe 1/16”, so they provided convenient edges to guide my razor blade as I trimmed the masking tape, but those edges also damaged the blade very easily. A blade with a galled-up edge tends to tear the masking tape instead of cutting it cleanly, so I had to replace my razor blade a couple dozen times.

 

With the polishing/sandblasting/repainting, it came out pretty good:

 

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But of course, you can't just hang this thing unceremoniously on a basement wall. It needs a frame, dammit! So I set about making a frame for it. Start with flat aluminum stock:

 

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After a little trimming, drilling, and sandblasting, I ended up with this:

 

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A little spray paint and some rubber edging, I got it to this point:

 

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And finally, the finished piece:

 

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In the right lighting, it looks pretty sharp hanging on the wall:

 

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And so, that's where it sits:

 

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This workbench been in our family for 52 years now, and I wonder how many years it was working in the factory before that, helping ALF make wooden ladders. 20, 30 years? Who knows? It sure has gotten around quite a bit since then, and been through a lot – and I will surely keep it busy for years to come.

 

 

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Nice work on the A/L plaque Mitch, looks great! :thumbsup: We ran American LaFrance here in Tewksbury years ago. When I got on the department 20ish years ago we had three, one was still in service. One of the other two had the open cab like in your picture. No turbine though! :grin:

 

A lot of the guys remember those engines fondly and miss the simplicity of them, compared with the multi computer trucks we have now.

 

Pat

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Nice story and nice bench. When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, I often walked past our local fire station which, except in winter, almost always had the doors open during the day. The ladder truck was an American LaFrance and I always thought that was a really cool name. The guys kept it washed and polished like a show truck which, in a way, it was...

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Great story and great work on the badge, Mitch!

 

Looking at the construction of that bench, I'm thinking that when they were building ladders, the two side sections of the bench supported the verticals (or whatever those pieces are called), while the center section was raised up to support the rungs in proper alignment with the holes in the vertical pieces.

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How come the sign ain't lighted? You know - like in a bar or somethin'.

Oh Oh - and maybe put a rotating flashing light above it.

Then all you would need is a 'Stay back 500 feet' sign near your power tools.

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Joe Frickin' Friday
Really nice write-up.

 

What would be neat is to paint that entire wall like the front of a fire truck.

 

Careful - this is how crazy ideas get started. Back in college, a friend of mine had the front of a 1957 Chevy Bel Air hung on his dorm room wall - everything from the license plate holder back for about a foot. And yes, the headlights worked. :grin:

 

Maybe I'll go buy that truck afterall...

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I had a friend who fixed up an old style rounded refrigerator to look like the front end of a VW Microbus.

 

That is a great job on the LF emblem and a very nice touch over the bench.

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Mitch:

As a Grandson and Son of firefighters, thank you for keeping this little bit of History present and respected. Though I did not choose to enter the family business of firefighting (I chose to be a Paramedic instead), I still remember responding to fires, spending days at the station and washing the trucks. It always brings a smile to my face when I see someone take such pride as well as respect for that storied profession. Thank you and thank you father as well. Just think of all the houses and lives saved by the products your father helped create.

Thanks so very much

Mike

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Nice job Mitch! :thumbsup:

 

When I was telling my wife about this over the weekend, I asked her if she remembered the time when we were shopping for a new (to us) house, and when we left, we told the realtor that we weren't interested in the house, but I would love to buy the workbench in the basement. The realtor said I would have to get in line, there were three other guys who said the same thing! :rofl:

 

 

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... but I would love to buy the workbench in the basement.

 

I kept looking at the pics of the workbench thinking about how many projects I could start, ...and never finish. :dopeslap:

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