THE MODERN DAY EVOLUTION OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The Modern Day Evolution of the Industrial Revolution
Heavy metal makes a comeback
By Billy Ingram
Covered in rust, covered in scale grease — no one wants that in their home.” That’s Chris Lutzweiler describing the Industrial Age metallic mastodons he scours the country for. Lurking under the surface of this Jurassic junk is what he sees as unimaginable beauty. Hidden for decades, fallowing in forgotten warehouses or lying flat in furrowed fields, there’s an unmistakable allure that is, as he puts it, “all hiding underneath.”
Hiding in plain sight to him, yet, to the untrained eye, nothing more than the detritus of a bygone era, unwanted, dilapidated tatterdemalions transform when, conducting business as The Rustic Factory, this metallurgical magician performs his extraordinary act of restoration prestidigitation.
A heavy-duty table saw dated 1930 has been converted into an impressive 30-by-50-inch drafting table featuring a new glass surface, easily adjustable both up and down, and vertical to horizontal. In a similar vein is a commanding boardroom table, spanning approximately 14-by-14-foot with an 8-foot base, topped with a $5,000 glass surface weighing over a quarter- ton. “You can literally crank it higher or lower with just one hand.”
Fashioning furniture from outmoded heavy machinery was a shabby — not- so-chic — concept embraced in the 1960s and ’70s, when lofts carved out of shuttered manufacturing plants were leased to bohemian artists and musician-types. These creative free spirits mounted tabletops over abandoned hulking monstrosities that weighed hundreds or thousands of pounds and were forevermore bolted into hardwood floors, thereby rendering the intractable practical.
Somewhere along the line, that forward thinking, backward-leaning sensibility tilted from hippie to Haut. High-end lifestyle purveyors like RHA and Restoration Hardware began marketing vaguely reminiscent specimens of industrial-looking home and office furnishings.
There are entire lines of steampunk-inspired executive desks and home furnishings scattered about the marketplace today, pleasing enough to the eye. But these too-cleverly designed pieces betray an overly-labored approach at approximating some fictitious exactness, so overwrought that any minor adjustment requires motorization. Mere superficial “reproductions,” they lack any genuineness or authenticity that made the genre appealing to begin with. Researching this stylistic phenomenon, Chris Lutzweiler realized that most of these ersatz thingamabobs-cum-household-accoutrements actually originate overseas. “I still loved the look,” he insists, “but I wondered what inspired that style? Where’s the real deal?” What he discovered is that those real deals “are egregiously expensive, shockingly so, and incredibly difficult to source.”
Born in Chaska, Minnesota, but raised in Greensboro, Lutzweiler never envisioned pursuing a career crafting one-of-a-kind furniture from sidelined tool-and-die contraptions resurrected from the turn of the last century. And yet, the attraction came naturally. “I’ve always been fascinated by the mechanical nature of machines,” he explains. “Any kind of machinery, any kind of engine, moving parts, anything like that.”
After about a year with little clue as to what he was actually doing, he says, “I spent a small fortune, but got started with a couple of authentic pieces.” Lutzweiler began retooling and simplifying complex machinery that could be employed as resolute office desks, dining room tables and the like from discarded dinosaurs of the industrial age.
No matter the source material, this is a labor-intensive undertaking. “There are people that like this style but can’t really go for the authentic thing because there’s a cost to it,” Lutzweiler says. “It’s not cheap, but a lot of people who reach out to me want the real thing.”
The first step is bathing any moving mechanical parts in a strong, penetrating oil — hardware, bolts, pulleys or anything else that will need to be extracted.
After allowing the oil to penetrate over several days, the original piece is carefully and painstakingly disassembled and cataloged for reassembly. “At this point, larger components are glass blasted with heavy industrial equipment outside of my facility,” Lutzweiler explains. “Smaller and more manageable components are done myself by hand.” After a century’s worth of rust, paint, scales, grease, and dirt are eradicated, only the cast iron or underlying steel remains. “This is a critical time as bare iron or steel will actually ‘flash rust’ within minutes.” The next step is mission critical, Lutzweiler insists, and if not performed immediately, the time- consuming blasting process will have to be repeated. “Freshly blasted metal is usually a dull gray or white, and full of residue and salts,” so removing that corrosive patina and achieving a desired, cast iron finish requires hours of high-speed polishing and wire brushing. “This is the longest and most intense portion of the process that brings out the beautiful, natural color of the metal.”
The clock begins ticking again, buffed metal needs sealing as quickly as possible before any rust can form. “Each individual component is sprayed with clear coating, then the entire piece reassembled and clear-coated again several times over, ensuring that natural finish is protected.” Lutzweiler once spent an entire workday preserving a single fastener: “Nearly eight hours to save the original bolt, where a new one would have sufficed. However, the customer wanted it as original as possible.”
When it comes to maintaining the structural and period-perfect integrity of these armored antiquities, Lutzweiler occasionally needs a capability beyond his capacity. With those unusually hard cases, he has turned to Scott Cain at GFC Machine in High Point, an automotive machine shop specializing in race car chassis construction, repairs and custom fabrication.
Cain recalls when this wannabe furniture-maker (prior to Lutzweiler even entertaining such a thought) first entered his shop: “It was years ago, when he was at GTCC’s automotive program.” For college credits while still in high school, Lutzweiler attended GTCC’s middle college, where, one afternoon, an instructor guided students through GFC’s workplace, offering some insight into what machine shops are capable of.
“I’m going to say, maybe five years ago, Chris started coming here to get me to do little odds and ends for him,” Cain recalls. Those “little odds and ends” often entailed work-arounds that would likely stretch the capabilities of the most accomplished machinist. “His stuff is extremely old and just a little problematic to get what he wants done with it, to get pieces to break loose without damaging the parts.”
“Scott is a great guy — he shakes his head every time I come in the door,” Lutzweiler remarks with a grin. “I have to give him a lot of credit because the man is a genius with anything metal and I want things to be authentic. If that’s how it was originally done, I want to do it that way; I don’t want to improvise. And he just wants to shake me sometimes.” It’s a fortuitous match.
“Any time there is a customer-facing welding spot, I’ll ask Scott to do ‘NASCAR-style’ welds that are cleaner and more rhythmic,” says Lutzweiler.
“Honestly, it’s all in a day’s work,” is Cain’s response. Recalling a particularly complex collaboration, he adds, “One of his tables had a set of gears that had four individual Acme thread posts that would elevate the tabletop. Yeah, that one was difficult. When it worked right, it kinda made me feel good because it was such a challenge.”
That particular item, a Portelvator adjustable hand-crank cart made by The Hamilton Tool Co. circa 1890–1930, was sitting, nonfunctional, in the lobby of a high-end fitness studio in Detroit, presently enjoying new life as a deceptively simple bar cart. “What made the whole thing tricky was every component had to be precisely in sync or the gears would lock up,” Lutzweiler explains, down to the threaded rods, sun gears, worm gears, pins and chains.
Lutzweiler’s venture has him traversing across East Coast byways, exploring the Rust Belt’s every loop, in pursuit of technologically primitive behemoths originally manufactured for carving out cabinets, window frames, dining room tables and the like; those machines that once made the furniture, in turn, will become furnishings. “Ohio and Pennsylvania are a treasure trove of authentic turn-of-the-century pieces.”
Of particular interest, many of the most desirable mechanical manifestations of Industrial Revolution ingenuity were forged right here in Greensboro. Lutzweiler describes one of those transformations as “a Wysong & Miles crank table for a molding sander that can now be a dining room table or an office desk. You can turn the hand wheel and it will raise and lower.”
Augmented with a glass top weighing in at 300 pounds, “you can adjust it with two fingers, it’s so smooth. It even says ‘Greensboro, North Carolina’ right there on it.” Wysong (sans Miles) has significantly downsized, but is still doing business locally.
A hefty Wysong & Miles Co. belt sander currently serves as the base for an executive desk, where floor-level hand-wheels turn with incredible ease to lift the 150-pound glass top effortlessly. “I actually polished each individual chain link by hand,” says Lutzweiler. While he can’t be sure of the exact date, he notes, “the machine had a patent number on it dating to 1896.”
In most cases the fossilized relics he’s uncovering were one-offs, built at great expense to specifications for specialized tasks. Inevitably, they ended up discarded by the companies that utilized them after an ignominious descent into uselessness, shoved into cobwebbed corners or piled outside into junk-heaped islands of misfit toys. Take, for example, a Pennsylvania casket factory crank table Lutzweiler unearthed. “It had been sitting there since it was purchased, according to the fourth-generation owner; they’d never used it in his lifetime.”
Although these aging bulls no longer emit whatever pitch they once played — one can imagine cacophonies of sense-dulling grinding, scraping, jangling — in silent repose, they elicit an instantly recognizable, weighty vibe. Native to hardwood floors, these pillars of grand austerity can’t help but add momentously to the vocabulary of any room, in particular lending an unmistakable sense of architectural symmetry when situated in an equally distinctive environment.
A celebration of hardware pre-software, there’s timeless beauty in a hanging throne, fit for royalty, improbably adapted out of a rusting artifact resembling something rightfully left behind on Skull Island. These theatric lounge chairs are constructed around pre-World War II engine cranes and elephantine factory winches once used to maneuver heavy equipment. “You can literally sit in there, take a nap, read a book, fall asleep, watch TV,” Lutzweiler says. And they’ve proved popular.
Although his company has a web site (therusticfactory.com), if mid-century Mad Men taught us anything, it’s that word-of-mouth advertising is the only sure-fire campaign — can’t fake that. “Clients will have somebody over for dinner,” Lutzweiler points out, “and somebody will say, ‘I want that for my boardroom, or a beach house — where do I get a table like this?’ And they’ll put them in contact with me.” Repeat business is something he’s become accustomed to. One gentleman, who’d previously acquired creations from The Rustic Factory, “asked if I could repurpose the wooden trusses of a vintage pre-World War I airplane into a chandelier with wings on either side. It’s all wood and completely encased in glass with run lights throughout it. This thing is probably 30 feet long.” Lutzweiler explains, “The wing lowers when he wants more light, raises when he wants it to spread out more, and it’s just a few turns of a handle. It was such a massive project, GTCC’s aviation program was kind enough to let me use their facilities to assemble it.”
For the same client, Lutzweiler painstakingly restored then assembled four Lineberry carts sourced locally from North Wilkesboro — and “usually fairly gross” to begin with — into a train to fabricate a TV stand. “It goes in a long, long pattern and it’s got a handle at the end. What I love about this is, it’s so ridiculously heavy — egregiously heavy — but we figured out how to make it so anyone can move them.” That handle consists of a pivot with a pin. “You just pick it up with literally two fingers and you’re moving a thousand pound train. It’s insane how effortlessly these things move.” Typically in that instance, artisans will take the existing wooden top, sand it down then scuff it up a bit. “However, I don’t want to do what everybody else does. I actually installed black walnut to achieve a book-match effect.” As much as Chris Lutzweiler is in the groove right now, there’s an inherent finality to the direction his life has taken. “These are depleting assets,” he says. “There’s only so many of them left.” It’s become something akin to a treasure hunt, rooting out what few oxidizing dinosaurs may be remaining, yet to be revealed. “People that know what these are in the industry, they all go for them at once, and it’s who can get there first and fastest. Sad part is, eventually I’ll have to change business models or do something different, which is fine — when the authentic pieces do dry up.”