Bruce,
What a delight to put the lumber yard memories back in order.   Many many
thanks.  The images come back clearly now.   The "Tuning Fork" screwed up
memories as well as city planning.

Driscoll Brothers was indeed east of Aurora St., right beside the creek
You turned in beside the big Mayflower warehouse and the place was down
behind the ESSO gas station that has become a pizza place (gas of another
kind).   The outdoor sheds of the lumber yard were behind the warehouse
before the printing company building was built, and the millwork shop was
south and east of the gas station.   The wood shop was long and narrow,
right beside the creek, and had two levels.   There was a main line shaft
and belt drives, and there was a turbine below the building.   As a little
kid, I recall stepping over a scary opening in the floor that looked down to
the turbine rumbling away below, and if you stood on a little porch at the
east end of the shop, you could see where the water rushed out and back into
the creek.   All the shop guys were showing me how it worked because my dad
took me in there and he was a nice friendly guy that a lot of them knew.
That workshop atmosphere was a joy of competence and a decent pace of life.

For many years I have been restoring and running an historic grist mill with
belt and pulley drive all the way from the water wheel.   Not a gear in the
place.   10 rpm to 20 rpm to 40 rpm to 200 rpm to 400 rpm to 700 rpm.   The
belt drive systems are very low maintenance due to the slow speeds they work
at compared to (good?) direct drive electric motors.   While doing milling
demonstrations, I have talked with many old timers who confirmed how easy
and pleasant it was to work with line shafts and belt drives.   One
especially nice feature is the low pitched quiet sounds generated by low
speeds.  It is easy to talk while machines are working at 400 rpm instead of
3000+.   If you are musical, you will recognize that the common machine
speeds are those of the human voice pitches.  Working in the old mill is
also like having a massage, with vibes at 20 cycles and 40 cycles per minute
moving through the floor and up your legs.   You feel relaxed all day as
opposed to working around high speed electric or gas motors that need to be
geared down to working tool speeds, and whose high speed gearing adds
another aggressive noise.   The high pitched whine makes you tense and you
weary sooner.   With the advent of electric motors, the most usual refit was
to just install a single large multiphase motor to power the entire existing
lineshaft system, simply replacing the water power gismos that were a lot
harder to service.   In my experience, the inner mill power train is a piece
of cake that requires only regular lubrication and minor adjustments from
time to time to account for shifts in the weather, while the water works
requires frequent maintenance, patching and occasional rebuilding.   The
belts become friends, each with personalities.   Old time sawmill workers
have told me the large main drive belt in a mill usually had a personal name
and was treated like a living thing.   Direct drive motors on shop tools
more often showed up in newly built shops, easy to plug in and get going
quickly, "plug & play" style.   They went along nicely with the new style of
ugly bland post-war commercial buildings like the places built at the east
end of town.

cp in bc

Subject: Ithaca Lumber Yards
>the mill and building supply store located on Six Mile Creek was
> Driscoll Brothers, a large operation in a brick building that may've
fronted
> on State Street.  It apparently shut down between 1956 and 1960 (judging
by
> business directories from those years), part of the business being sold to
> become Baker Lumber or possibly (Bob?) Baker Kitchens (a WoodMode rep) and
> later forming the partnership called Baker-Miller Lumber of Groton.  It's
a
> little hard for me to picture exactly where it was located but it sounds
as
> though it was east of Aurora Street in the area where Green Street (which
> didn't used to come that far east) forms the south side of "The Tuning
> Fork."
>
> The bus station was located behind the Ithaca Hotel (west of Aurora
Street)
> but I'm told there wasn't room for much else before the creek.
>
> As to hydro powering the Driscoll Brothers mill I haven't learned anything
> on that yet.  In general one whould think that the use of belt drives
> would've gone out when centralized power sources  or "prime movers" in
> factories (hydro, large steam or gas engines) were replaced by small
> electric motors, one for each piece of equipment.  That some mills kept
them
> in use for a long period after the advent of good electric motors (I would
> think shortly after WWII) suggests they didn't want to make the investment
> or had a decent central power source they didn't want to give up.  I would
> think that the losses and maintenance associated with spinning all those
> long shafts and belts had to be pretty high.
>
> I hope to have more on Stoddord's Tannery in the next few days.
>
> Bruce
>
> --
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> <http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>

--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>