stay away from those machines as much as I could. Hmmmm, I wonder if
there
are any shops that still use .......? No! Couldn't be!


As late as 1975, there was a machine shop in Venice, California, that ran
almost all the machines in the shop via belt drives off a great big electric
motor that sat outside the building in its own little shed. A shaft came in
the wall and distributed power to at least three shafts, spaced along the
ceiling, that ran all the way from one side of the shop to the other.
Wherever there was a machine, there was a flat pulley on one of the overhead
shafts, and a leather belt and idler pulley with a cam-over lever arm to
engage the machine. I used to drop by there from time to time just to watch
the whole thing run.

A year or two later, the owner had retired and sold the shop, the new owner
had torn the building down, and God only knows what happened to all that
lovely machinery.

Tom Dacon