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There is a new product from Vogt Toolworks, an after- market fence for drill presses and band saws. To read about it and see videos click here. My production is limited at the moment due to my accident in July but I am back on my feet and making progress.  Basic Stop Two weekends ago a friend and I hiked to a wondrous section of the Johns Brook, a boulder strewn Adirondack mountain brook that flows into the Ausable River in the Keene Valley. Our destination was a section known as the “Devil Slides,” a run of waterfalls, pools, and flumes about three hundred yards long culminating in a chute similar to a log flume. The river lines up east-west and the smooth and beautifully undulating rock surfaces heat up nicely so that by lunch time you can begin to explore the different sections of the water course by jumping in the icy water, knowing that there is a warmed stone surface awaiting you that matches the curvature of your body. Dive, swim, lie down, warm up, and repeat.
I had not hiked the South Trail of the Brook in several years, evidently since the devastating Tropical Storm Irene of August, 2011. At the beginning of the trailhead was a sign announcing the trail was officially closed and not maintained. Twenty minutes in we arrived at a crossing spot and were amazed to see erosion along the banks rising up perhaps one hundred feet from water level. Huge boulders had been thrust that high. It truly appeared as if bombs had been dropped. It is illegal now to maintain the original ADK markers placed on the bark of trees. The land has been designated a “forever wild” status. There is enough regular use of the trail by hikers (some have built rock cairns at key points), that you can make your way fairly easily. There are, however, numerous places where you have to find your way the best you can. Gone are the small log steps and bridges because soils were either scoured away or the hillside completely reshaped. There had been heavy morning rain and the footing was difficult. We took our time and in about an hour and fifteen minutes arrived at the slides and noticed, with great relief, no significant storm damage. It was a spectacularly beautiful summer day and we took full advantage. We departed after about four hours of fun. Thunderstorms were in the afternoon forecast which we hoped to avoid. Ten minutes out we came to a bushwack section of steep hillside. I was relying often on tree branches and exposed roots to get me by where the dripping moss underfoot could be treacherous. I grabbed hold of a root and felt it release from the soil and then… My hiking buddy, Joe, several steps behind, didn’t see me at the moment I fell. He glanced over to where he expected me to be and instead heard two lethal sounding thuds. My drop was about twenty two feet onto a rock that jutted from the water’s edge. At the moment of impact I experienced crepitus as four ribs broke and my right lung was punctured, a sensation described as feeling like rice krispies in the chest. At the same time my iliac crest was fractured (the curved superior border of the ilium, the largest of the three bones that merge to form the os coxa, or hip bone“), my left big toe broken, and right wrist and fingers sprained.
(The photo, taken days later in the hospital, shows the chest tube that passed through my ribs to help reinflate the lung.) The next impact on a lower rock lacerated the top of my head.
Then I landed in the brook a few feet from shore. I rose from the shallow water in shock, aware that my life probably depended on being able to climb up to a flat surface beyond the irregular stones in front of me, to a place where I could lie and await help. Blood streamed into my eyes and sprayed my hands as I clambered upward for about twenty feet to a good sized flat rock with a gentle slope. I positioned my body with my head on the upward slope and lay on my back. Joe’s calm and deliberate voice followed immediately and we discussed the situation. We were out of cell phone range and he needed to hike back for help. He bunched a towel and pressed it against the top of my head and placed a rain parka over my chest. I asked him to snap a picture before he left.
We both understood that it would be two hours or more before he would return. Those two hours were a constant struggle to stay conscious and to focus my mental energies to keep my core warm. Four separate thunderstorms rolled through and soaked me to the bone. What I dreaded was succumbing to hypothermia. I called upon the love and support of family and friends. Little by little my digits and limbs began to tremble, and then shake, but I kept a fire going inside. Joe hiked back to the “garden”, an area with multiple trail heads where we’d parked. He was still out of cell phone range but found that in the ticket collector’s booth there was a land line made available for just such situations as ours. He called 911 and they transferred him to the Department of Environmental Conservation who put him in touch with a park ranger living near by. Jim (I forget the names of the many great folks involved in my rescue) made calls to several people and arranged for two ATVs, and he and Joe hiked back. You’d better believe their voices sounded angelic to me! Jim had with him a heavy coat to place over me as well as a shot he administered to ward off nausea. It was very fortunate that there is a road that parallels the South Trail by which atvs in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter take supplies to the Adirondak Loj several miles past the slides. After a time the crews appeared. I was strapped to a board and carried by hand for twenty five minutes and then tied to an atv. It was a long crawl out of the woods until joining an ambulance around 10 p.m. Then to an emergency room in nearby Elizabethtown where I had ct scans and my head stitched up. Finally, the ambulance delivered me to the trauma unit at Albany Medical Center at 4 a.m. I am truly lucky to have survived my fall in the woods. A few inches or angles either way could have killed me outright or paralyzed and maimed me. I am luckier still to live in a world with people who devote their lives to the rescue and care of others. Thanks to all.
A puppy in the living room above my shop hasn’t whined, whimpered, or barked from the noises of a shop vac or high speed cutting tools. The sound of a back saw or coping saw sets him off, however.
My customers sketched a top for their coffee table. I drew it out full scale for one half of the mirrored design and determined that the miter angle was 62 degrees.
An auxiliary jig platform for the Vogt Shooting Board was indispensable in fitting all the pieces.
The veneers were bandsawn and planed to 5/32”.
That’s not actually a veneer thickness. The mitered pieces were treated as blocks and glued on two or three at a time. After a couple of days of curing the whole top was thickness sanded with the veneers, top and bottom, ending up at 1/16” thick. What creates the chatoyance is the sequence of laying the veneers in the rows across the width of the top.
Moving your head a few inches while gazing “into” it creates strikingly different views of the grain- what was rich brown becomes a smoky gray, the columns of darker veneers trade places with the lighter ones, and different three dimensional shapes suggest themselves.
Yellow glue was the adhesive. It’s to be expected that there will be some “creep” and the molding that wraps the perimeter is designed to allow for it.
The shelf is made of solid wood, 1” thick, and is treated like a panel within the rails that has plywood splines glued into grooves on the inner edges.
A 3/32” space on each side of the shelf allows for expansion across its width. The ends are pinned from the underside at their centers. A bevel was planed along the inner edges of the legs as viewed from the sides… at 62 degrees, of course.
What follows is a long series of construction pictures.
Scrub planing shelf.
Finish planing and using winding sticks.
Ripping leg taper.
Planing bevel.
I plowed the shelf panel grooves on the table saw, registering the rails and the shelf against the blue tape strips on the rip fence. The grooves were a tight fit for the plywood splines that glued into the rails. I removed the tape and ran the shelf against the fence. The tape thickness created the tolerance for the shelf to slide and not stick on the splines.
End frame glue up.
Shooting the veneers was a pleasure.
A stack of veneers shot exactly right.
To press the individual veneer blocks down I enlisted the weight of some saps who were hanging around and drying out after a tough winter. Their job was just to stand on sandpaper-faced blocks that were slightly smaller than the veneers.
First column done.
Nearing the end.
The veneers overhung the edges and were scored with an offset cutting gauge prior to trimming with the saw.
Finishing was a long process: shellac, oil/varnish, then coats of Waterlox brushed on full strength. Three weeks of curing before rubbing out.
The edge molding was the final task. The Donkey Ear allowed a perfect fit.
Wondrous things happen on the world wide web and, for me, this story is one. I have written several blog posts about my inventor father, C. W. Vogt (1891-1973), and with the collaborative research of my sister, Sarah Vogt, have successfully established that he was indeed the creator of the Votator, a breakthrough process that has touched everyone’s life, a scraped surface heat exchanger used in the manufacture of margarine, lard, peanut butter, soap, automotive grease, and much more. A similar process for frozen dairy products was the Vogt Instant Freezer which he patented in 1930.
It is one thing to work toward making sure someone is credited for their work, it is another to write with authority about the actual production. Enter Tony Mathis, an application engineer and product manager for Vogt Freezers and the Votator, a native of Louisville who passed the Votator factory sign on his way to school as a kid. “I have always been curious about your father, since I found very little mention of him in the files that I have. I found the 1931 picture of him in the Ekstrom Library archives, and I have seen the WWI photo in uniform on some old literature, but could not find much else on-line until stumbling across your blog yesterday.”
About the VIF Tony has written in an email: “Not only was it a continuous process so the benefits of mass production could be realized, but the ice crystals were so small that they gave an exceptionally smooth and creamy mouthfeel and they resisted freezer shock (formation of large ice crystals over time) much better than any other batch-wise freezing process. The added air, referred to as the overrun percentage, could be controlled at will to make standard ice cream holding 50% air, or premium products with more butterfat and only about 30% air. The VIF became the preferred method of making frozen desserts for all types of distribution. Besides the MelORol package, the discharged product could be filled into gallon and quart-size cartons, or into molds to make frozen bars. After the freezer, a Cherry-Burrell fruit feeder could add fruit and nut pieces into the continuous stream and a variegator could inject a ribbon of fudge, strawberry syrup, or some other liquid on the way to the carton filler. In 1956 a three-barrel Vogt freezer was introduced so that ‘Neapolitan’ chocolate-vanilla-strawberry flavors could be packed at once in the same carton.” Tony has graciously accepted my proposal that he contribute pieces about the Vogt Instant Freezer and the Votator. This post is about the MelORol Production, and he’s collected some wonderful archival photographs for it. THE MELOROL PROCESS REVEALED By a Former Product Manager for Vogt Premier Freezers Clarence W. Vogt perfected the Vogt Instant Freezer, the first continuous ice cream freezer, in the late 1920s. The ice cream quality produced by this equipment was unsurpassed by any older batch freezing methods. It was renowned for its creamy, smooth texture and consistent flavor and quality. But, not content to stop there, the Vogt Instant Freezer Company also perfected a novel packaging system that eliminated waste and allowed hygienic, “untouched by human hands” distribution all the way to the point of serving. The ice cream was frozen into a continuous bar, wrapped with an easily-removed paper, and sliced into cylinders for precise portion control.
This novelty became known as the MelORol, a brand owned by Bordens and produced by the creameries of their Pioneer Ice Cream Division including Abbott Dairies in Philadelphia, J. M. Horton’s and Reid’s Dairy in New York City, and Hendler’s Creamery in Baltimore. Starting about 1930 and for the next four decades, it was a favorite memory of many American and Canadian children. In the early years of the Depression you could go to a local soda fountain or snack bar and trade a Liberty or Buffalo nickel for a cup or cone of the finest ice cream in the world, produced using the Vogt Instant Freezer. See http://www.inthe80s.com/food/mellorollicecreamcone0.shtml for many personal stories involving MelORol. MelORol spokespersons included Slim Timblin, a blackface performer, and later the Dionne Quintuplets. And of course Elsie the Cow, who appeared in the film Little Men in 1940. Interesting memorabilia include a series of MelORol trading cards featuring prominent figures from world history, and advertising buttons that were issued as part of the marketing strategy. A MelORol packaging line started at the Vogt Instant Freezer, where ice cream mix and air were pumped into the freezer barrel and then rapidly frozen to a stiff consistency. The ice cream was extruded out of a pipe into a cylindrical bar shape. A tube former and filler wrapped the bar with two continuous pieces of paper, forming paper tabs on each side that would later serve as handles for unwrapping. The wrapped bar passed into a freezing tunnel or hardening chamber through a small hole in the insulated wall.
The bar was cut into long sections and conveyed slowly through the hardening chamber, while frigid air was blown across the surface to freeze it solid. A typical bar was 13 feet, 9 inches long.
At the end of the tunnel, the hardened bar was cut into sticks of 18 to 24 inches long by a traveling cutter. The sticks passed out through another hole in the wall and into a stick hopper.
The sticks were manually or automatically loaded into a slicing machine, where the final MelORol serving sizes were determined. The slicing machine could be adjusted for portion sizes of 3 to 5 ounces. MelORol lines produced between 100 and 300 gallons per hour of these tasty novelties.
The MelORol slices were wrapped in hexagonal cartons called bales. These were sent to cold storage until they could be distributed.
MelORol was discontinued in the 1960s in the US, and the 1970s in Canada, after refrigerators with freezers in the home became widespread. Consumers could then bring home cartons of high-quality ice cream produced on Vogt Freezers, scoop it out in just the right serving sizes, and forget any worries about other people handling their treats. It was the end of an era that had generated fond memories for so many.
Further reading: “Covington, Kentucky 1913: A Family Mystery.” Click here. “From Missiles to MelORols: Covington, KY, Mystery Update.” Click here. “Clarence Vogt, Prolific Inventor from Louisville.” Click here. “Ice Cream by the Mile.” Click here. “My Grandfather’s Clock Face.” Click here. My paternal grandfather, Adam Vogt (1862-1946)), had an early professional career in Louisville, Kentucky, as a jeweler and horologist.
In researching my family I’ve come to know about his later careers as a manufacturer (written about in this blog post) and realtor. Little, however, about his life as a clock maker has come to light. A Google search reveals that his business was located at 132 West Market Street at 1st and 2nd. The Jewelers’ Circular, August 5, 1891, mentions that he visited Cincinnati, four months before his first son, my father Clarence, was born. There are buildings in the city still standing with the name of his manufacturing enterprises
and products still around and in use in the way of hydrants
and electric mowers
There appears to be nothing from the years employed at a workbench skillfully crafting fine time pieces. My dad talked about his father’s jewelry business to the extent of mentioning a sign facing the street with the bold initials OIC and an image indicating that a fellow with new glasses finally had working vision (“Oh, I See!”) A second cousin, twenty or so years my senior, relates what he’d heard, that Adam worked so hard at his jewelry business, actually sleeping in a cot at the store, that his health declined and was told by his doctor he had to quit. At that time he and his young family lived with his prosperous brother-in-law, Christian Henry Wedekind, on Cane Run (later West Burnett).
The move to a manufacturing occupation, joining forces with his brother Henry, may have been as much a financial decision as one based on health. All roads leading to evidence of Adam’s clock works lead to nothing until one of those amazing web moments when I received a message last week from Cathy Shiff (http://vintagebycathy.com/) who had acquired clock faces from an estate sale in Atlanta.
She quickly searched his name on Google and read my blog posts. Finally, we connect with Adam’s hand work. It was a long time ago.
With the boreal winds barreling down our backs and snow endlessly falling, deep winter can be an excellent time to work on development projects. The distractions are few and one might as well hunker down in the shop.
This winter’s project has just been completed. The No-Rock Runway from last year has evolved, in the case of Ron Brese’s Brute, to incorporate linear motion hardware. The smooth ride and solid feel are, well, hard to describe. I find myself sneaking shavings on it when there’s really work to do elsewhere. Here are some photos of the prototype.
Many thanks to Dick Brownell for his outstanding machining and ideas in helping to make this work. Collaborating with him is fun and very educational. This coming weekend Vogt Toolworks will have a booth at the Northeastern Woodworkers Association 23rd Annual Fine Woodworking Showcase, along with Bob Van Dyke from Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking, Matt Bickford with his molding planes, and demonstrations in drawer making by Rob Porcaro.
It was at the 2009 Showcase that I met Ron and his son Daniel. A dining table of mine was in the exhibit, and as I walked down the aisles of vendors the friendly smiles of the Breses drew me over to chat. It took several moments to take in what they were offering. After seeing Ron demonstrate planning a board with an infill plane on a small traveling workbench with incredible hardware by his friend Jameel, I was dumbstruck. There was a new world of hand tool woodworking out there! A year later he took my first model Super Chute to a Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Atlanta and that got the ball rolling for me. Come to the Showcase March 29th and 30th to take the Brute for a glide.
Screens, sidings, and doors were next. I had new (and expensive) siding made up to match the clapboarding on the house made for me years ago by a now deceased sawmill owner. He died helping a friend saw a branch off of a yard tree.
The screen doors were built from Spanish Cedar. This wood is really beautiful and a pleasure to work.
The pass- through door to the house meant removing the double Andersen window unit. I figured the rough opening allowed room for a door and a window light on one side. There was a fun play of shadows on the inside when the shower curtain covered the opening temporarily.
The hipped roof utilized leftover timbers from the house building in 1980 and rafters from an old barn frame that we used for an addition in 1996.
The door was built from clear Eastern White Pine, 1 ¾” thick. It has insulated panels and insulated glass.
Here’s how I insulated the panel area. First I attached a 1” x 1 ¼” ledger around the inside openings for rigid foam insulation to fill. One side of the door had the wood panels and moldings applied.
But wait, not so fast! The ¼” pine panels need to be allowed to expand and contract. In this instance they are not floating as they would be in a typical frame and panel door. I first countersunk screws along top and bottom edges, then removed the screws and widened the holes.
Similarly, after tapping the nails for the moldings the moldings got pulled off and through holes drilled so the panels can move around the nails.
The door and light fit right into the scheme of things.
 West side of house during construction in 1980. This past summer’s project was to build a screened- in porch over the existing deck on the west face of our house, which covers the entrance door to the basement shop. The west side takes the hot afternoon sun throughout the summer and the heavy winds and weather. When it rains, the windows have to be closed, not great on hot, muggy rainy days.  Back in the day! In an earlier post I wrote about working the rough sawn cedar timbers with hand tools (“Hand tools with rough cut lumber”). This post will demonstrate more techniques about using rough sawn material and how to make new milled material fit with it. The first order of business was to thin the arbor vitae planted 27 years ago at the edge of the driveway in front of the deck, now nearing 30 feet in height.
The trees grew as clumps and I left one per clump. What got taken out may end up as deck railing. After replacing the treated support posts and beefing up the joists and beams, a new cedar deck (eventually painted) went down, aluminum screening having been stapled over the joists first.
The old oak deck boards are now feeding our woodstove.
The post material consisted of 14’ long cedar 6” x 6”. I ripped some in half to provide 3” thick pieces for the half posts against the house, the door jambs, and the mid-span posts above the sills.  Circular saw, band saw, planer.  6″ x 6″ and 3″ x 6″ Cedar.  Door jambs showing band saw and scrub plane marks. Each post was tenoned into a mortice in the treated sills and further anchored beneath with timberlock hardware.
The area on the sills where each post landed was hand planed flat and level. With the posts braced and plumb I could establish a level top line. (The sacrificial flakeboard panels remained on the deck throughout construction).
There is a fair amount of irregularity in this type of building situation: the treated joists have been out in the weather for thirty years and the top edges aren’t all lying in a perfect plane, the rough sawn material used for studs in the wall framing is not uniform in width and thickness. You have to pick your battles and decide what you can allow to be funky and what you want to be spot-on. My focus was on getting the Spanish Cedar sills nice and straight, scribing their ends to press tightly against the rough inner faces of the posts, jointing the mid-span posts to look neat and square to the sills, making, fitting, and hanging the screen doors and pass-through door to the house. The overriding skill to have: scribing. This vertical spacer jig was an invaluable aid.
It positioned the studs with the correct setback for the siding (no pencil marks to try to follow) and provided a platform to lay the horizontal pieces in place for scribing between the posts.
I prefer to work with knife lines taken from the actual pieces rather than tape and pencil and these jigs allowed me, working alone, to do so.
The horizontal 2” x 4” in this picture shows what a square end against the post looks like, as well has how much the width of the rough cut pieces can vary.
To scribe the sills I used cardboard templates.
A long edge of the sill would lay on the jig and butt against the post, a card brought alongside, and the shape of the post transferred to the cardboard.
A mark on the edge of the sill would either be a longer or shorter point, depending on its slope away from square.
Once the scribed profile on the template was cut away with a mat knife it was knifed on the board and sawed with a jig saw.
The mid span posts had shallow shoulders and were fastened with angle screws from below.
By mid summer the roof was done and the framing intact, waiting for screens and doors to be made.
My friend Michael Ward from Peach Pie came up to musically christen the room. We had a great time jamming on some cool tunes in the new room on the (now) shady end of the house.
In honor of my father’s upcoming 122nd birthday December 30th, here are two new items to add to the published research about his legacy as an inventor: an article I wrote for the Louisville Historical League this summer “Clarence Vogt, Prolific Inventor from Louisville” (click here) which finally tells his story to the folks of his native city, and the following newspaper piece from 1934 wherein a simple breakdown of a manufacturing process appears to have led to the development of his world famous Votator. As always, thanks to my sister Sarah for all her research and for finding this article.
CAPTION: Clarence Vogt is a refrigeration engineer. He gets his ideas from cantankerous refrigeration pipes. One of them is ice cream by the mile, which is making him a fortune. New York (AP) – When paper for lining tobacco tins stuck together and a pipe froze, Clarence W. Vogt laid the foundation for an income of $1,000 dollars a day. That’s what he said, “One thousand dollars a day.” And just a year ago he was struggling along on $100 dollars a day making ice cream by the foot instead of by the gallon. Vogt, born in Louisville, KY., studied refrigeration engineering at Cornell University. About seven years ago he was working at his own plant in Louisville when a large tobacco company found it couldn’t keep the half-block-long sheets of waxed paper for tobacco tins from sticking together in hot weather. They called Vogt. He fixed that with refrigeration. And then the tobacco company asked him to fix some other little things in a plant manufacturing small bricks of ice cream. Vogt remedied that trouble too. Then he tried to change the age-old process for making ice cream, a delicacy the Romans are said to have made using snow for refrigeration. Ice cream for years has been made in batches. The mixture was poured into a freezer, paddled, and poured out and frozen solid. But sometimes the batches varied in quality, and the process took time. Vogt tried making it, among other ways, in flakes-like snow- and putting it into cakes that way. One day the refrigerated pipe which carried the mixture to the snow making point froze… too much brine around the pipe. But the frozen ice cream mixture in the pipe was good to eat, Vogt found, and that started him on his new idea. Today his patented process makes ice cream by the mile in pipes- one continuous process instead of in batches. Ice cream ingredients are poured into the pipes, mixed, frozen, forced out under pressure in long rolls, chopped off in small pieces, wrapped and delivered. He figures a twenty five percent savings in power and refrigeration over the old method for making bulk ice cream, no savings in the finished product because of other costs which are higher, and a twenty percent final saving between his product delivered wrapped and bulk ice cream delivered in the same manner. 100 Miles a Day The first plant using his system was opened in Detroit in 1932, and now the plants using his system have a total capacity of 100 miles of ice cream a day, about seven feet to the gallon. Vogt figures a potential capacity peak of 1,750,000,000 feet per year. The ice cream end of his business is well under way, he believes, and he is turning his attention to using his piping process for butter, cold cream, lard, and other such mixtures. He is working out those ideas in his small shop in Greenwich, Connecticut. Among the latest is a cardboard package for ice cream, butter, and other commodities which can be removed and sliced. Instead of taking off the lid and digging out the contents, with his package the side is simply ripped open to expose the entire commodity. |
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