24.

How Do You
Run a
Woodworking Shop
Without Electricity?

GORDONVILLE, Pennsylvania—Joe King and his two teenage sons, David and Amos, had finished breakfast and walked to the shop beside their house. Like many other Amish families in Lancaster County, the Kings needed to supplement their farm income. Today they were building gazebos. A man from New Jersey distributed most of these decorative wooden lawn structures.

Joe went to the control panel at the rear of the shop and pressed a button. The diesel engine in the basement erupted with a dull roar, making the floor vibrate. The same engine powered the vacuum pump for the milker, the refrigeration compressor for the milk cooling system, and the compressed air pump that provided water for the farm.

Above the engine was an old planing machine. It was connected to the engine by a rubber belt extending through a hole in the floor. The belt was fixed around a grooved wheel, on the end of a rotating shaft from the engine.

Joe pulled a lever which tightened the belt on the planer wheel, sending the machine into motion. The planer’s roar soon drowned out the sound of the engine.

As Joe placed long boards beneath the rollers on top of the planer, rotating blades caught hold of the wood and gnawed at the bottom. When the board came through the machine, the planed side had a new, smooth surface.

Joe kept feeding two-by-fours into the machine. Five could fit side by side at the same time. David caught each board as it came out and placed it on a stack.

Close by, Amos sawed sections of three-by-three beams to length. The radial-arm saw he used looked much like a regular electric saw, except for the extra mechanism on one side, into which two rubber hoses were attached. These hoses connected to pipes and a hydraulic pump mounted on the engine in the basement.

The pump circulated oil from a large reservoir beside the engine. The rapid movement of the oil powered the machinery.

Joe had just installed the system and was preparing to put in a hydraulic table saw. Hydraulic equipment was expensive, but it was supposed to provide more efficient power than the electric tools many non-Amish used, and with less wear.

After all of the lumber had been planed, David unhooked a hose that was attached to a hand drill on the opposite side of the shop. He attached the hose to a band saw, then turned a knob that looked like a water spigot on the side of the tool. This did not regulate water, but air. The hose connected to a pipe which went to an air compressor, also attached to the diesel engine.

As David cut the boards, Joe rounded off the edges with a router. Like the saw, this tool ran on compressed air, or pneumatic power.

Amos went to a table saw close to where Joe and David were working. He pulled a wooden lever, which tightened a belt in the same manner as on the planer. This was called the line-shaft method of powering tools. A drill press and welder also were attached to the engine in this way. Amos began making angle cuts in a stack of boards.

By the afternoon, the diesel engine had been shut off, but a large reserve of compressed air had built up in the 2,600 gallon tank in back of the shop. Most of the power hand tools in the shop ran on air. There were two kinds of sanders, a hand planer, a circular saw, a reciprocating saw, staplers, hand drills, and power screw drivers. All could be attached by rubber hoses to the various air outlets situated around the shop.

A few of the items were made to be used with air, but most were modified electric tools. Joe and his boys had made some of the modifications themselves.

Amos and David began assembling the gazebos. They worked rapidly with power nailers—pneumatic guns that could shoot a nail the whole way into the wood with one pull of the trigger.

Soon the gazebos would be ready for pickup and shipment on a special trailer to the distributor.