of the

Engineers are helping revive the steam age for art and archaeology s sake.
^ ßy J^fin Thilmany^ Associate Editor
 FOCUS ON DESIGN

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ " n Oakland, Calif, a motley band of young Though archaeology is often thought of as an examina-
^^M engineers, fabricators, machinists, artists, tion of our distant past, the British changed the defini-
^^M piumhers, and others gathers Wednesday tion of the term shortly after World War II.
^^M nights in service of a shared love: steam. "That's when they realized the extent of what they'd
^^M Hammers clang and sparks fly above lost in the war," Gould said. He's a member of the Soci-
^^M gentle verbal sparring as the volunteers ety of Industrial Archaeology, founded in 1977 and
^^M who make up Kinetic Steam Works labor headquartered at Michigan Technological University in
^^M to recondition steam engines, which wiJl Houghton, Mich.
^^M power what director Zachary Rukstela Gould unearths old blueprints. He found a high school
^^M has called kinetic artistic installations. textbook from the 1880s for industrial design students
^^M Among its projects since its inception filled with hand-drawn models, for example. He rebuilds
^ H four years ago, the collective has restored the blueprints on his home computer with computer-
^ ^ ^ H I ^ ^ H a steamsliip and sent it down the Hudson aided design software.
River as part oí an artistic excursion. It has created and "I have a life-long passion for the superb design and
demonstrated a Baker fan—originally used to test the craftsmanship by those who have come before us. and
horsepower that a steam engine generated. the development of technology that has led us into the
Meanwhile, farther down the coast in San Diego, Wil- 21st century," Gould said.
liam Gould is perched in front of his home computer With help from original blueprints and SohdWorks CAD
recreating in exact engineering detail and color the 1879 software he's detailed an 1879 Mason Bogie locomotive to
Mason Bogie locomotive. discover exactly how it oper-
At first blush, the activities ated, something !iistt)rians
uiay not seem too closely relat- couldn't quite determine.
ed. But Gould and the Kinetic Photoshop software allowed
Steam Works crew are bent on hiiu to exactly match the
unearthing and documenting train's color scheme based
the dimly remembered recent on a few paint chips from an
past. They've turned to today's original model.
engineering techniques to help Built by the Mason Loco-
their efforts. These designers motive Works, the colorful
devote their free time to their Mason Bogie is considered
fascination with a not-so-long- by many train buffs to be
gone technology. And they're one of the most beauti-
bent on preserving it. ful locomotives ever built.
"If you think about it, the It's often dubbed the Swiss
steam engine was the beginning of the end. It turned watch of trains. Cítnild said. The only surviving real-
man into an operator and not a tender, so to speak," said world Mason Bogie^—a much earlier, different style from
Andrew O'Keefe, a Kinetic Steam Works volunteer. Gould's model^—is maintained in mint condition at The
"And with the advent of steam came other fuels and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
ability to change the land at a rate unseen. It was an inter- Like a museum curator, Gould seeks to recreate the ele-
esting transmutation to where we are today." O'Keefe gance and beauty of a time, not so long ago, when an engi-
earns his living as an independent contractor fabricating neered object could be a thing of wonder and beauty.
metal works for film and theater sets. He lends his exper- "So much today is designed to be thrown away," he
tise to Kinetic Steam Works' projects. said. "In the past, many things were flat or round and
machined by hand. These were simple designs, almost
Archaeolo^r as Art elegant in their beauty^—and made by hand."
Gould, a design consultant on medical devices, consumer And worth preserving digitally, said Gould, who has
products, and test fixtures, uses CAD technology to recre- recently opened a virtual museum for technology at
ate in painstaking detail engineered objects from years www.gouldstudios.com. His online museum is filled
past. In the process, he's become an industrial archaeolo- with historically accurate cyber models and faithful rec-
gist and an artist in his own right. reations of artifacts that no longer exist.

Through his work at Gould Studios, WiUiam Gould calls upon 3-D design software to create engineered objects lost to the past, like the 1879 Mason Bogi
locomotive (opening page) and its engineering detail (above). Gould's recreation won a prize in the SolidWorks International Design Competition in 2006.

September 2009 | mechanical engineering 27

 '-i'

A Top: Zachary Rukstela, director of Kinetic Steam Works, makes sure thai Pappy, a steam-powered Case tractor, is good to go before a recent outing.
Bottom teft, the Case emblem. Bottom right, the works of the Baker fan, which was used lo test the horsepower of steam engines.

"Unfortunately, so many important objects have been
lost to time or neglect, or often exist only in inventors'
notebooks," Gould said. "It's my goal to save them for
future generations."
Artists ami Engineer.^
And in a certain way that's the goal too of the members
of tlie Kinetic Steam Works collective.
Rukstela told us, "During the day, I'm a freelance
engineering project manager." He manages projects as
an avocation, too.
"We work on stuff that already exists," Rukstela said.
"We're not trying to create new objects. Mostly, we're
taking systems already designed and proven 150 years
ago, and beautifying them a little."
The volunteer crew usually partners with artists who
want to produce what Ruksteta terms kinetic art that
just so happens to involve steam engines. The group is
also now building its own in-house pieces. Along the
way, the organization has brought together like-minded
people traditionally separated by a generation gap. Older
engineers and younger engineers often share an interest
in studying and preserving technologies like steam, but
they rarely collaborate on it.

28 mechanical engineering | September 2009

 "A lot of chat disconnect is because groups tend to be iso-
lated. Old guys who work on steam equipment don't have
crossover with young warehouse rats," Rukstela said.
He hopes that his group will be able to attract some
older engineers.
"I simply thought Td cry using vintage equipmenc co
run kinetic art," he said. "I didn'c really know if it was
going to work or where it was going or anything, but it
turned out the idea caught on."
The collective kicked off four years ago with a restored
1920 Case tractor engine named Homme. That engine
is still the heart of the organization, but is feeling a liccle
neglected right now as volunteers have moved on to oth-
er works, O'Keefe said.
For instance, they re now at work on a steam-powered
carousel designed by Jamie Vaida, an artist who does
installations and sculptural and functional works. Rid-
ers will perch atop metal butterflies, spiders, ant, lions,
moths, and grasshoppers. Another project called the
Moveable Type Sceam Press, uses the treads of steam-
powered tractors to make imprints on ground surfaces
such as sand. The treads are designed to make prints of
words or images.
Last year, the collective garnered attention for the

T Betow left, a volunteer works on a vintage sewing machine that "just for fun'' is powered by steam. Below right, the Althea. the steamboat restored by
Kinetic Steam Works as part of a floating art project that saited on the Hudson River last year. Bottom: inside the Kinetic Steam Works shop.

September 2009 | mechanical engineering 29

On display in William Gould s virtual
museum is Ferguson s Mechanical Paradox
Orrery, which demonstrates the relative po-
sitions of Earth and the sun at various times
of the year. The 3-0 model of the orrery
was created from an illustration by James
Ferguson published in 1779.

A Gould's digital Porter-Allen steam mitt engine, circa 1890.
Althea, a steamboat that it restored and sent down the
Hudson river from Troy, N.Y., to Queens as part ot"
an exhibition spearheaded by the artist Swoon. It was
part performance art and part art exliibit. Altliea was
one of seven vessels in a flotilla, each powered by a
recycled engine.
Regardless of the project at hand, for O'Keefe, who
is in his thirties, the simplest joy is introducing an even
younger generation to steam and getting a reaction from
the older generation. For instance, the collective recently
featured its 1917 Case tractor engine in an Independence
I^ay parade in Piedmont, Calif.
"Kids get so excited," O'Keefe said. "If you're in Indi-
ana on July Fourth you can sec 50 of those engines, but
in an urban environment like Oakland most people have
never seen anything like that.
"If you stand there and look at the drive train or any of
the niechanisnis on top of a steam tractor, it's mesmer-
izing," he said. It also introduces young, potential engi-
neers to the joys of steam engines.
Practicing engineers understand the allure as well.
They've given their nod of approval to Kinetic Steam
Works' creations, O'Keefe said.
"A lot of times we've gotten engineers and fabricators
that say, 'I'm so glad someone like you, who wouldn't
normally be interested in this, is keeping it going in their
own way,' " he said.
He's found a certain irony in young people such as him-
self and other collective members who have rediscovered
steam. The pairing of youth and technology changed
the Internet from a specialized military and government
domain into a universal service. It also originally pro-
pelled steam power to popularity, O'Keefe said.
"When we got started on these projects, we realized
that a lot of the people who were working to make these
machines exist during the early times of the Industrial
Revolution were in their teens and twenties," he said.
"It was all new and wide open, just like the tech revo-
lution we recently witnessed. It takes people who are
thinking outside of the box to make things happen; peo-
ple stuck in their ways don't make new things happen,"
he added. "That's my philosophy anyway."
Drafting the Designed
O'Keefe and his friends are products of the Internet and
technology revolution as well. In their work at Kinetic
Steam Works they've found a way to marry the old and
the new, when it comes to drafting and designmg the
steam engines.
O'Keefe chooses to draft Kinetic Steam Works' proj-
ects in the 2-D AutoCAD program because it stream-
lines design but still feels akin to old-style design. It even
displays views as if on a drafting board, he said.
"I learned to think about objects by hand drafting and
tliis CAD prograni lets me think like that, but it takes
less time," he said. "If I have time to, I'd do it by hand.
AutoCAD looks like a drafting board and I can treat it
like one."
Though he sometimes dabbles with three-dimensional
CAD programs, he still finds himself returning to two-
dimensional digital methods.
"The 3~D programs are more about creating your part
trom a basic shape," O'Keefe said. "But I want to draw
the lines and see the computer screen as if it's a drafting
board."
Gould, who recreated the Mason Bogie locomotive
in SolidWorks, also uses that program for much of his
industrial archaeology work. He also uses a render-
ing application called hyperShot from Bunkspeed Inc.
According to Gould, 3-D design software is a necessary
tool to give shape to his art.
A Goulds recentty completed 1913 Modet T Speedster rendering.
"Although CAD has redefined the notion of crafts-
manship, CAD is a powerful tool to recreate objects that
have disappeared or exist only in a would-be inventor's
sketches," Gould said.
The folks at Kinetic Steam Works say software can
speed repurposing and bringing back to use the old
steam engines they so admire. So in this way, young and
old technologies are united in defining and keeping alive
the artistry of the engineered past. •
September 2009 j mechanical engineering 31