Spud's blog: Old and New - Beautiful Lonergan Brass Gauge

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Old and New - Beautiful Lonergan Brass Gauge

"If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer, 'He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone'." - Epictetus

Have you ever noticed that artistic and beautiful things are now completely segregated from the things we use daily? I'm not sure why that is. Very few things are built with aesthetics in mind any more - everything we routinely use is utilitarian and usually disposable.

There are still beautiful and cool things you can buy from craftsmen, but very few ordinary items are built with any kind of beauty - some houses and cars, maybe. Back in the day, things were made to look nice, just because. And that was when the country was a lot less wealthy than it is now. Maybe they were wealthier in spirit.

Take a look below. Do you think the new sewing machine will last 100 years like the older one? The old one has more grace and beauty in a single screw than the entire new machine has. Why must it be so ugly and cheaply made?

What you see below is a boiler steam pressure gauge, which might have once been on a locomotive boiler in between the World Wars. This was built in a time when things were made to be both useful and beautiful.

I spotted this gauge at an online auction, mistakenly listed as a damaged "clock". I picked it up for $15 as the only bidder. The shipping cost more than the auction, because it's quite heavy. On eBay, these can cost several hundred dollars - which I was unwilling to spend for a decor item.

Below is the modern equivalent, with the same pressure rating. Yes, it will tell you the pressure. It's also cheap, disposable, homely, and pathetic.

The antique gauge is gorgeous, but it arrived pretty corroded. It had clearly led a difficult life after being removed from service. The glass is missing, the movement is bound up, the needle is slightly bent and twisted, and the trim ring has several dings. The thing is huge (nearly a foot across) and heavy. I began cleaning it up - which turned out to be a much more difficult project than I expected it to be.

Before starting, I scrubbed a small section of the trim ring and face plate with some Brasso to see if each surface would clean up. They started to shine up nicely, and it seemed like all it would take was a little effort with Brasso to remove the grime, so I took it apart. It wasn't quite so easy though.

After a few rounds with Brasso, the trim ring went into the deep sink with a bottle of Kaboom (mild acid) for several more rounds of scouring with Scotch-Brite pads. This was just to remove the corrosion.

The back side was nasty as well. The acid-wash cleaning took forever to get every surface down to bare metal.

Even when I was mostly done with the acid cleaning, there was still quite a bit of pinhole-sized pitting.

Here I've attacked it by hand with Kaboom, Metal Polish and Brasso. Yet it still looks pretty blah.

Eventually I moved on to 600 grit wet sandpaper and spent about 30 minutes going after the micro-pitting. Afterwards, it still looked pretty rough up close.

I removed the needle, because it needed to be straightened out and painted. This allowed access to the face, so that I could polish the grime off without further bending the needle. As I found out, the face plate is steel with a very thin layer of brass plating. A fair amount of that brass plating came off as I removed the grime. It's cool though. It still has a slight yellow color.

The inside was a mess. The spring that dampens the movement (to keep the needle from bouncing around and vibrating) had broken off, and gotten bound up in the gears. I had to disassemble the mechanism so that the movement would be free.

Below: How it works. Steam pressure inside the Bourdon tube tries to straighten it out slightly. This in turn pulls the link, which rotates the gear sector on the pivot, and turns the pinion, to which the needle is attached. Goddam clever!

I finally caved in and put the trim ring on the buffing wheel. I used some metal polish to cut the surface down. There was no way I was going to have time to hand-polish it in any reasonable amount of time. I still need to clean the interior up, paint the case, and have a piece of glass cut... after Christmas.

Before and after: It will look good hanging on the wall in the office. No, I didn't bother calibrating the needle to zero yet, since I still have to go back into it.

UPDATE 24 December 2021: I've recently done a little research on this pressure gauge, and it was manufactured by the J. E. Lonergan Company of Philadelphia. Nothing special there - the company made a lot of equipment for boilers - safety valves, oilers, gauges and steam whistles.

What is interesting is the "Leslie & Elliott Boiler Works", Patterson, NJ. This company manufactured rotary steam plows for railroads, and so I suspect that this gauge came from a rotary plow.

Below is a video of one of these awesome rotary snowplows in action - this one is a Swiss-made steam plow, but it's the best video I've found of a steam-powered one. They start clearing snow at about the 10:00 mark. It seems to bog down a lot - probably due to the snow being heavy spring-melt snow.