Re: C&S #1006

I was asked by the guys rebuilding C&S Bobber 1006 to reproduce some of its parts. I just finished making two replica steps. When I inspected an original step I found that each of the four step brackets were a slightly different design. And the spreader between the side panels was unnecessarily asymmetric. But I decided to make the replica steps identical to the originals for authentic appearance.

In retrospect that was a huge mistake. It caused fabrication to be more expensive and assembly was error prone and unnecessarily time consuming. I had good intentions but repeating the same bad practices of a hundred years ago was just plain stupid. And as a friend pointed out to me, I’m probably the only person that will know about the issue.



My guess is that the original steps were designed by either a very junior engineer or someone that didn’t care about producability. Labor was cheap back then so not much thought was probably put into assembly time. Also standardizing parts for inter-changeability on an item this minor was probably not in vogue at that time.

I am also going to make a new smoke stack for the stove and a water tank for the sink. I visited CRRM to look at what was in 1009 which caused me to also wonder about originality. The smoke stack on 1009 seems to use modern adjustable elbow ducts and the mating joints have a modern crimp connection. I was wondering if anyone has photos showing the original fabrication approach that was used on smoke stacks like this at the turn of the 19th/20th century. Since that bend in the stack is highly visible I want to make a replica that matches the likely original appearance as closely as possible.