Westmoreland News, P.O. Box 699, Montrose, Virginia 22520
This article originally appeared in the Westmoreland (Virginia)
News, and is reprinted here with permission. It was sent to us by
Robbins Douglas, Rt. 1 Box 476, Kinsale, Virginia 22488
A pine-green 1920 Fairbanks-Morse chuffs to life under the hands
of Levern Jewell. The handle that starts her isn’t the
beautiful piece of brass Jewell cut for her, but that one was so
heavy it flung itself around and nearly smashed his knee.
‘I thought my knee was broken. It hurt so much. I thought,
‘Man, if that ain’t awful in this world!’ So I hobbled
over to the hacksaw and cut the pin off so I’d not use it
again.’
We’re back to the old aluminum crank, but even without the
fancy handle, you can tell the engine is enjoying it selfglad to be
running again under any circumstances.
‘The rod was rusted right off when we looked at it. Lucky
the right man got a-hold of her,’ admonishes Jewell’s
friend Robbins Douglas, who’s been agitating for awhile to get
us down to Jewell’s shop at Harry Hogan.
The Fairbanks-Morse is one of those workhorse engines willing to
do any kind of work necessary: saw wood, grind grist, power the
wringer washer ‘Yep, the women would come get it on Monday to
wash with,’ Jewell notes. ‘It beat the devil out of
breaking their knuckles on the washboard. It was such a
labor-saving device.’
A tiny engine a little bigger than Jewell’s two powerful
cupped hands rests on a display table nearby. He made every part of
her from a block of cast-iron whose picture he flourishes proudly.
Everything except the timing gears that is. He’d have had to
buy a gear cutter the right size to cut them, and it was more
cost-efficient to buy them. The tiny engine putts along, perfectly
tuned to save fuel by operating hit and miss; her water-cooled
engine ignited by a spark plug attached to a coil.
Bright shavings of bronze look like Rapunzel’s gold, filling
two big tubs. One heap came from the lathe, another off the milling
machine Jewell used to cut a bushing that would accommodate a
six-inch-bored wheel to a five-inch shaft.
Born in 1920, he was trained at the Navy Yard as a machinist
starting in 1941, then served in the Navy from 1945 to 1946.
Because he didn’t like the city, Jewell bought several
precision lathes from the Navy, including one small
sewing-machine-sized one and another so big it can accommodate a
42-inch prop, but so finely tuned it was used to refine gunsights
which raised and lowered the 16-inch guns, and thus had to be honed
to within a thousandth of an inch.
With the lathes, he returned to his native rivers, where he
opened a machine shop with his brother, Alton. ‘When he went
fishing, I bought him out.’
For more than four decades, he proceeded to solve every problem
the watermen and sawmill operators could cook up for him. He holds
onto everything, including a tiny steam engine he built back in
1943, its base made of melted fishing sinkers. He powers it now
with air so it won’t rust up.
During the past two years, he and a group of local engine
specialists have been working together on the engines they take to
shows.
‘Well, Donald O’Bier, Frederick Downing, Hilton Hamblin
and I are always down here getting him to solve our problems,’
Robbins Douglas notes.
Jewell is a private man, who doesn’t often work on anything
while visitors are in his shop because safety and a precisionist
nature demands unadulterated concentration around his machines.
During our visit, he creates a beautiful brass paperweight to show
off his tiniest lathe’s smooth operation, having first promised
we’d never hear a noise.
The mesmerizing hum and purr of the engine and the bright
bronze-gold spirals which peeled away to allow the finial to emerge
are downright hypnotic, as Jewell’s painstaking guidance
choreographs the action of the bit.
Every so often a throat-clearing noise emerges as the bit gently
gnaws away at the chunk of metal.
Jewell moves slowly, but with vigor, his efficiency a matter of
doing things right the first time as frequently as possible.
‘You don’t get paid for working fast,’ he admonishes.
‘You get paid for doing right.’
‘There’s not much Levern can’t do, given time, if
you don’t bother him,’ Douglas sums up. ‘There’s
also not much stuff he’ll work on while you’re here if
it’s yours.’
A machinist often starts with much more than he’ll end up
with, taking down a piece of metal from 225 pounds to a piece that
may weigh less than a fifth of that.
In the process, he’ll have utilized many different tools,
hence the vast array of thingamigs, whadyamacallits, and other
tools on which Jewell can immediately put his hand when the call
arises.
He admits to always having been mechanically inclined, perhaps
even to heh, heh, rearranging his mama’s innards while she was
carrying him.
Airplanes and dirigibles flying overhead sparked his youthful
imagination, though he says he doesn’t claim to have invented
anything.
Maybe not, but when those Smith Island dredge boats came over
here for Krentz Marina’s men to haul, they always stopped off
at Jewell’s shop too.
How come? The dredges were hauled by Plymouth motors with direct
drive, which had a universal joint like that of a car. The slight
bit of flexibility offered by the universal meant they didn’t
have to be perfectly true, and they didn’t work anywhere near
perfectly, either.
Which is where Levern came in. He’d put on a straight
coupling with a thrust bearing, which made all the difference and
left everyone ‘about tickled to death, because the one I made
wouldn’t wear out.’
He also put Chrysler marine clutches on automobile motors
obtained from junkyards, lengthening the useful life spans of
both.
Then there were the winder rigs he made for dredging oysters and
fishing nets, the pile driver cable uptake mechanisms, the many
propeller wheels he bored.
‘But it’s all played out now on the water,’ Levern
says sadly. What’s in now? Nothing. Oysters are gone. Fish are
gone. You used to be able to walk round the shore anywhere and dig
you a mess of mannoes (tasty bivalves) for your supper. They’re
gone now too.’
A potato vine winds its way around a pair of patent tongs
outside, and the dock beside three family boats is dotted with crab
pots and other waterman’s tools. His son Bobby still crabs, and
Alton’s son Brian fishes, but they’re certainly among a
soon-to-be extinct breed, Jewell fears. And when the work-boats go,
machinists as a breed may well soon be doomed to follow, he says,
for pleasure boaters don’t require the same sort of intensive
maintenance.
Which is not to say he’s full of gloom. The shop bears
witness that there’s always something to do.
As he strides up and down on the 12-inch-thick concrete floor he
mixed and poured himself, among the maze of lathes and saws,
grinders and drills, Jewell makes a note of some of the things he
does to balance his life.
Every day from noon to one, for example, he works in his garden,
where that day he’d picked black eyed peas and turnip greens.
‘A cement floor tears your legs up,’ the jaunty 73-year-old
explains. ‘If you work in the garden, your legs don’t hurt
as bad.’
Then there are plenty of new gadgets to fool with. He holds out
a two-inch-long dial indicator which registers variations as fine
as one-thousands of an inch.
Talk about grinding true, that’s true for you. A watchmaker
he’s not, emphasizes Jewell, but he did go into his wife’s
watch once and cut of piece of mainspring off when a hook broke. He
bent a new hook on the end of the spring, put her back in, and
‘she worked for years.’
A man able to deal with that sort of detail might drive himself
crazy if he couldn’t focus. Jewell has the ability to narrow
his vision, however, ‘I don’t see too much,’ he quips.
‘Anything I don’t want to see, I just ignore.’
What he does want to see, he tends to measure and quantify, with
such implements as a gear gauge that tells him the diametrical
pitch of the teeth of a gear by measuring from the center of one
tooth to another. Knowing that, he can reproduce it.
His ear is keenly attuned to the sound of the tools, so that if,
for example, an impure streak exists in a bar of metal, he’ll
hear it on the lathe, like a musician who quickly detects a false
note in his symphony, or a sculptor whose stone chisel strikes an
air bubble.
Much of his work involves keeping a weather ear out for problems
during such tasks as boring a propeller wheel on the giant 15-ton
lathe. In the meantime, he can labor on a tiny engine or another
job.
‘Since I’ve retired, I can work on what I want,’
Jewell gloats a bit. ‘I’m not under pressure. I can pick my
jobs and won’t take work I don’t want. But then, I never
did!’ he admits.
Thrifty with materials, he used the fir skid that originally
rested beneath the giant lathe for the sills in his house after
he’d gotten that lathe where he wanted it with the help of his
sons. He still has the monekywrench the Navy issued him when he
went to work in the gun factory, although he never used it as a
wrench, ‘only for a hammer.’
If there’s one thing he wanted to do and never did, it’s
to figure out how to take electricity from the air and use it to
operate motors. ‘They’re taking solar energy with solar
plates. There should be a way to transform it so it would operate
your car,’ he muses.
Well, there is one more thing he’d like to have done. But
it’s not something for which there’s a crying need
anymore.
‘I’ve always had an idea to fix a fish cutter to cut
herring. It would also have separated bunker [menhaden] from
herring. Bunker have a spot on one side or the other, and there
could have been an electric eye.’
Unlike most folks who worked in the fish factories, and many of
his fellow machinists, Jewell still has all his fingers.
He doesn’t claim to be accident free, however. Witness the
time he caught his left hand in the big lathe.
‘It happened late in the evening on my 60th birthday. I was
working on a winder and I wanted to finish drilling it. I caught my
hand between the chuck and a can of compound, which struck the
lathe and broke the drill in three pieces.
‘One struck Bobby in the chest, another broke a bone in my
left hand. It wasn’t bleeding much; they just pulled the skin
back over it, but it didn’t set right. They had to rebreak it
later and put a pin in.’ He pauses for the punch line.
‘Never have figured out why I have arthritis in my right hand
and none in my left!’
A milling machine will greedily suck in a brush that’s being
used to oil metal in the process of being cut. ‘You’ve got
to cultivate a loose grip to keep your hand from going with
it,’ he jokes.
Warming up to describe the hazards of his trade Jewell points
out that no matter where he puts a freshly created piece of metal
heated red hot from one of his tools, ‘even if it’s on a
shelf clean out of the way, somebody will come in and pick it up
unless you say, ‘Don’t go over to that vise!’
‘Uncle James was famous for that. He’d go right to it,
pick it up, and say, ‘Oh, this is pretty!’ He’d burn
himself every time!
‘Stuff like this will draw you,’ Jewell says,
flourishing the bright newly-made paperweight he’s sending home
with us as a souvenir. He’s already made sure it’s cool
enough to touch.
‘Or you lay your torch down she’ll flip over and burn
you. When I used to smoke a pipe, the matches in my shirt pocket
would all suddenly explode and burn my shirt while I was
welding.
‘When you’re cutting on the lathe, the brass comes off
small and can really hurt you if it comes down your shirt.
It’ll make you dance and think!’
Robbins Douglas mentions vanilla as an anti-blistering remedy
for burns, then the two delve into Jewell’s family heritage as
a waterman.
His fisherman father Daniel’s boat was the Ruth V. Carter.
Daniel’s twin John was also a waterman, as were his brothers
James and Clarence.
‘Now Alton’s boy Brian is the only one left who fishes
out of here,’ Jewell says sadly.