Jenna Davis is a 4-year-old with blond bangs falling past her eyes. That doesn't stop her from demonstrating how to clean a 1.5-horsepower Fairbanks Morse - or any other antique internal combustion gas engine on display here at the biannual Coolspring Exposition. "It's actually very, very important to do this," she says soberly, placing a few drops of lubricant onto the crank and bearings of a motor favored by farmers 80 years ago.
To get at a piston, she stretches her arms and rolls the twin flywheels, which are nearly half her size. "Other way, other way," says her father, David. Jenna manages to get the flywheels going in the other direction, and the piston eases out of the engine block within reach of her oil can. She gives it a squirt.
Soon oil dapples Jenna's sandals and oversize T-shirt. But stains are the norm for the 2,000 people who have flocked to the Coolspring Power Museum grounds this June weekend. A chorus of combustion - phht-phht-phht-bang! - echoes through the creek-fed valley in central Pennsylvania. Enthusiasts in welders caps have hauled their old engines on flatbed trailers and in the backs of V-8 pickups and are filling the parking lot and fields. (I'd rather be cummin than strokin announces one bumper sticker.) A few engines are as small as an original iMac; others are as large as a railroad car. Imagine an enormous spoked yo-yo attached to a cast-iron gumball machine screwed onto skids and you have a pretty good idea of what the bigger ones look like.
The people who converge on the town of Coolspring might spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on hunks of metal once lying fallow in old barns, fisheries, gristmills, or fields. The first gas engines, which became widely used about a century ago, were hooked up to other machines and used for all kinds of jobs - chopping wood, grinding corn, pumping water. But these collectors have no interest in doing anything so practical. They simply like to sit in folding chairs and see their motors run. They also enjoy watching their buddies' engines run - or helping to get them running. (Hearing someone yell "Smoke!" at Coolspring is not a cause for panic. It means a troublesome engine has snorted to a start.)
The folks at Coolspring tend to get starry-eyed when they talk about their hobby. A collector from Maryland admits that sometimes he'll just sit outside at night and listen to one of his 95-year-old Eclipse engines run. Others just love the way they look. (What's more beautiful than a tulip-shaped cooling hopper on a Bamford?) Or learning how an inventor 129 years ago solved the problem of inducing four-cycle combustion - intake, compression, power, and exhaust (or, as old-timers say, suck, squeeze, bang, blow). "Those few things can happen in hundreds of ways," says a nuclear engineer from Pittsburgh. And he can't bear to see these pieces of industrial history land in the dump.
On Friday night, the Davises relax with other Coolspring attendees outdoors by a fire. Jenna offers goldfish crackers to adults gathered around in camping chairs, reminiscing. As the evening creeps on, Jenna climbs into her mother's lap. David can't forget the motor he saw at last year's show: "It was selling for $65,000. If I had that kind of money, I wouldn't spend it on engines."
The campers gaze into the crackling flames. "Well, I don't know," a buddy says after a pause.
"I guess it's hard to say," David offers, reconsidering.
And in the warmth of a circle of friends, men and women imagine what it would be like to have any old engine they ever wanted.
- Erica Lloyd
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Engines on the Brain
