One Part Epoxy Putty

Bringing a velocipede back to life

For five years members of Lomita's South Bay Free Methodist Church have volunteered to help the city's railroad museum, which is just down the street.

At first they pulled weeds, upgraded a storage area and organized some reference materials, led by former church pastor Dan Palomino, said Lomita Railroad Museum Director Faith Bilyeu.

The efforts were part of a Torrance-based nonprofit project called Sharefest, which encourages volunteers to participate in community projects.

Then in 2008 church volunteers spent six months restoring - and improving - the museum's rotting 40-year-old wooden sign.

"I was extremely impressed," Bilyeu said. "That kind of showed me these people knew what they were doing, they were extremely talented and were more than capable of taking on this next project."

That turned out to be a major restoration of a deteriorating velocipede, which had long sat out in front of the museum next to its steam locomotive.

"I didn't even know what a velocipede was," said Roy Tsugawa, an aerospace engineer at Northrop Grumman who led a 27-person team from the church in the project. "Faith mentioned the velocipede was falling apart and they were going to remove it from display."

A velocipede is an umbrella term for any human-powered land vehicle with one or more wheels. A bicycle, for instance, is one type of velocipede.

In railroad parlance, a velocipede refers to a three-wheeled handcar propelled by an arm the operator pushes up and down.

Railroads used them to maintain and inspect tracks; silent comedy movies sometimes had hapless velocipede operators feverishly pumping the arm up and down to escape a locomotive bearing down on them.

The antique version owned by the museum was in no condition to go barreling down railroad tracks, however.

"It was built in 1881 and it was built for the Maine Central Railroad," said Richard Wuerfel, a member of the museum board who has researched velocipedes. "It's a real artifact."

But it largely consisted of rotting wood.

Moreover, clumsy attempts had been made in the past to restore the velocipede, Tsugawa noted. It was literally held together in part by baling wire.

Multiple coats of white, orange, yellow and red paint covered it.

And there were mismatched replacement parts, including hexagonal nuts instead of the original square ones.

So the team stripped the velocipede down to bare wood and metal in Tsugawa's garage.

"Basically, we copied it," he said.

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