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Building Cable Cars at the Woods Carpentry Shop
By Richard Bermack
Contributing Writer
Along with the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf, cable cars are San Francisco icons. This month we went to the Woods carpentry shop to talk with the workers who build and rehab them. Bob Harris, the shop supervisor, has worked on cable cars for over 30 years. “We have different tools today, but we accomplish the same thing, and the cars are pretty much the same,” he says. Many of the cars are over 100 years old, imbuing those who work on them with a sense of tradition and craftsmanship. “We are building moving historical monuments. They are pieces of art,” comments carpenter David Valstad.
The workers create every piece that makes up the car. They have a room filled with century-old patterns that they use to mill the wooden pieces or fabricate the metal ones, sending them out to a foundry. They recently hired a pattern maker, He Du, to maintain and update the patterns. With the advent of computerized milling machines, pattern making is a dying art. Du learned his trade in China.
The cars are made out of exotic, high-quality hard woods, such as Alaskan cedar, white oak, clear fur, ironwood, and apitong. To make the curved roofs, the carpenters steam and bend wooden slats held together with mortise and tendon joints. The wooden slats are then covered with canvas and painted. “We used to paint the canvas with lead paint. Then we realized lead paint isn’t healthy, so we switched over to safer materials, which is good for us but doesn’t last as long,” Harris explained.
The shop, set up in 1976, is state of the art. It accommodates eight carpenters, with room to work on two cars at the same time. The shop has built 12 cars from scratch and performed major rehabs on five cars. The shop is run by the city of San Francisco, and the workers are represented by Carpenters Local 22.
He DuPattern Maker
It is very hard to find pattern makers, very few in the whole world. My father owned a foundry in China. We would sit at a long bench and do everything by hand, like long ago. Making patterns is a very special trade. You need to know how the foundry uses the pattern to make the casting and how the machine shop will finish the part after the foundry. So you have to know two trades. I have a lot of fun here. I get to see how the parts fit into the cable car, so I can make a judgment and make things better. For example, they changed the frame on the roof and the post holder has to follow the curve. So I made a new pattern to follow the new curve. I felt so proud when the casting came back from the foundry, and I got to see it fit on the cable car.
Mark SobichevskyCarpenter, 5 years
Working here has renewed my faith in the trades. I worked four years in the repair shop on Mason, and then I didn’t place high enough on the civil service exam and was let go. I started a construction company. The pay was pretty lucrative, but there was no retirement and a lot of stress. So I retook the test and got rehired. My heart is in building the cable cars. Learning to work on them is making me a better carpenter. Eventually I will be able to build one of these on my own. I’ve built seats and different sections, and I’m pretty close to being able to do the whole thing. There are hundreds of pieces to mill, and some of them are mirrors pieces, so it’s easy to get mixed up if you don’t keep your wits. We also renovate the old cars, which is harder than building a new one. A lot of times the cars are whacked out of plumb and level. For example, on Car 24 we had to replace the whole roof. We are used to making things exact, but putting something perfect on something that is out of square requires a lot of adaptation. You can’t just give it a few taps. When we finish a car, there’s a panel where the carpenters sign their names and put things. On the next one, I’m going to write my daughter’s name and the date, and maybe place in it a photograph of her.
Bob HarrisCarpenter Supervisor, 30 years
It’s not like you just get here and can build a cable car. You may be a journeyman carpenter, but you have to serve an apprenticeship here too. It’s similar to furniture building. I like to fix the cars that got in a wreck. It’s a challenge putting them back together. My favorites were the ones other people thought were totaled. It’s like being a doctor and mending something that is broken. The cars haul up to 100 people a day and take a lot of abuse. When we work on a car, we pull off the front panel. Then just before we put the panel back on, we’ll sign our names and put in newspapers from the era, like a time capsule. It’s a tradition going on from before I got here. Everyone takes a lot of pride in what they do here and feels fortunate to have a job like this. Only nine carpenters in the world build these cars. The cable cars have become a part of my life. They are environmentally sound. They don’t use gas or diesel. My kids do reports on cable cars and bring their classes down for a tour. I take a fancy to the old stuff, and kids do too.
Dave ValstadCarpenter, 11 years
I was raised in the city. When I got a chance to build cable cars, I jumped on it. This is my second car. I like doing the wood work; some guys like working with metal. We just got John, who used to work for a stair company. He loves making the pieces. If I show him a piece on the prints, he will make it up to spec. There’s a lot of team work. With all the rain in San Francisco, these cars need to be built more like boats. I convinced them to thoroughly seal all sides of the wood. You really have to battle against the elements. We also work on the vintage street cars. We just rebuilt Street Car 28, which was pretty exciting for me, because my grandfather was a streetcar driver. The other day, I went and rode Car 28 with my grandchildren. This is one of the best union carpenter jobs in the US.
John BarberiniCarpenter, 11 months
It’s great working with people who care about the product and take so much pride in their work. I worked for 28 years building stairs for a private company that I thought was a classy company, but they pushed me out. Some people think a cable car is just a bus, but on Christmas I took a ride on one of the cars with my girlfriend and we watched the tourists. It was like Disneyland. I was born and raised in San Francisco. My dad worked on the Bay Bridge as a pile driver, and now I work on cable cars. This is a real classy organization, and we are building a class product, for a class city.
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