the power of the past

摘要

In Oakland, CA, a motley band of young engineers, fabricators, machinists, artists, plumbers, and others gathers Wednesday nights in service of a shared love: steam. William Gould, a design consultant on medical devices, consumer products and test fixtures, and the Kinetic Steam Works crew are bent on unearthing and documenting the dimly remembered recent past. Gould uses computer-aided design technology to recreate in painstaking detail engineered objects from years past. In the process, he's become an industrial archaeologist and an artist in his own right. With help from original blueprints and SolidWorks CAD software he's detailed an 1879 Mason Bogie locomotive to discover exactly how it operated, something historians couldn't quite determine. In a certain way, that's the goal too of members of the Kinetic Steam Works collective. The folks at Kinetic Steam Works say software can speed repurposing and bringing back to use the old steam engines they so admire.