We’re going to be featuring more profiles of the people who make the streetcars and cable cars run. Today: SFMTA machinist Bob Brown, part of a skilled Muni heavy rail overhaul team.
Bob Brown loves hotrods. Very fast ones.
So, what’s he doing working on historic streetcars that rarely top 25 miles per hour? Well, as with his hotrods, Bob likes applying his knowledge and skill to make something just right, something that others admire.
Bob worked for United Airlines at their SFO maintenance base before coming to Muni four years ago. His 20 years in aviation machining included a stint in research and development and work to extremely exacting specifications. So why the switch?
“It was boring, machining their parts. Looking for something different.” And he found it, working on the historic streetcar fleet in the Heavy Overhaul Shop at Green Division, across Geneva Avenue from Cameron Beach Yard, where the historic streetcar fleet is housed.
“Here I make new parts, refurbish old parts,” he says. “I have a lot of freedom to take the time and actually make them right.” In some jobs, he says, “you’re told what to do. They don’t ask, ‘Can you do this, and how can it be done?’ It’s, ‘No, you’re doing it like this, and this is the only way you’re doing it.’ Here, I like the freedom to use my knowledge and apply it to these old streetcars.
“There’s a lot of people who have to be told how to make this stuff,” Bob notes. “They need a drawing; they need everything in front of them to show them how to do it.” But of course, drawings often don’t exist for parts of the historic streetcars. “I don’t need that drawing. If I have a part that’s worn out or needs to be fixed, if I have it in my hand, I can recreate it.” That doesn’t mean exactly duplicating the removed part, because it has been worn down over time. “You take into consideration how old it is, how worn it is, how much material I should leave on it so it will work for another hundred years.” He agrees that his job is like a chef. “You can follow a recipe, but does it taste right?” he asks.
Keep on truckin’
One of Bob’s ongoing projects has been standardizing parts for the trucks under the Milan trams, built 90 years ago and modified several times in their Italian hometown before Muni acquired them in 1997. When he arrived, each part that needed replacement had to be custom made to fit on that particular car. Now, he says “It’s taken me a long time to get to where every pin fits; and with the help of the whole shop, we can take it off one car and put in on another. It used to be that each individual one fit only in that hole. Now I have a box of parts I can put on whichever [truck] I’m rebuilding.”
The biggest parts he makes are axles. He’s made about eight new ones and refurbished twelve. New axles start with a cylinder of steel weighing 600-700 pounds. Bob skillfully removes about 150 pounds to accommodate the journal boxes, the wheel openings, and everything else unique to that car. Refurbishing requires putting the axle up on the machine, “Check that it’s running true, check all the journals to make sure there’s still enough material on them to take off without losing the integrity of the part.”
The integrity of the part is critical, especially relevant to his current project: rebuilding the trucks under original, irreplaceable Muni Car 162. The original 1914 Baldwin trucks were damaged by careless loading by a vendor following body repairs in Long Beach. That damage was repaired by the vendor but the close inspection of the trucks showed pre-existing cracks in the truck frame and severe wear at the kingpin, where the car body rests on its trucks.
As a result, Muni is now fabricating all-new trucks for Car 162 that they say will look identical to the originals, and Bob is fully involved in that effort, bringing skills he’s been developing since childhood.
“I bought a welder when I was about eleven and just started welding.” And he went from there, learning more skills as needed to restore and soup up automobiles. Currently, he has a 1953 Willys wagon he takes to shows, and a 1932 five window Ford that’s broken Bonneville records. “It runs at 172 miles per hour; for a straight six, that’s pretty good,” he notes, modestly. “And I just picked up a new project, a ’38 one-and-a-half-ton Chevy [pickup].”
Does he recommend his job to people just starting out? “To certain ones, yes. It isn’t for everybody. You’ve got to have some kind of creativity, like working on old cars [automobiles]. You’ve got to have that kind of passion to come and do this.”
It’s clear that Bob Brown has that passion.
