Sunday, December 30, 2007
At Lehman’s Hardware,
traditional, American-made products are still being made and sold.
KIDRON, Ohio (AP) — It takes just 48 minutes for craftsmen Eli Miller and Chuck Kirkpatrick to build one of the marvels of 19th century kitchen technology — the Reading 78 apple peeler.
So named because of its 1878 origins in the machine shops of a long-dead Reading, Pa., company, the cast-iron culinary contraption allows a cook to remove the skin of an apple with the deftness of a plastic surgeon in about four seconds.
The mechanical elegance of the 130-year-old design also strips the 21st-century arrogance from the mind of anyone operating it.
Welcome to the workshop at Lehman’s Hardware in Kidron, where household machines and tools from a pre-electric era are still manufactured — and sold all over the world.
Tucked into a warehouse attached to the Northeast Ohio hardware store’s showroom, Miller and Kirkpatrick are the backbone of an effort to keep traditional, American-made products from slipping entirely into history.
In addition to the apple peeler, the two men make:
UA tabletop butter churn made completely of U.S.-produced parts.
UA grain mill designed at Lehman’s with stone and iron burrs for rough or fine grinding, assembled from U.S.-made parts.
UA traditional bucksaw — the tough granddaddy of today’s wimpy bow saws, with a heavy blade made in Germany and a frame made by a nearby Amish woodworker.
UA traditional corn planter enabling the backyard gardener to plant corn, beans and other large seeds in one operation without getting on his hands and knees, made of locally sourced parts.
UA tool called a froe used with a hammer to make cedar shake shingles, one at a time, assembled from Amish-supplied parts, including the tempered steel blade that incorporates a bead weld.
The hardware store has contracts with a network of Amish craftsman in Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania to make 40 or 50 other products in their homes and workshops. The list includes many toys, a shrewd move this year in the wake of the quality problems with Chinese-made toys.
Sensitive to the growing consumer backlash toward imported products, Lehman’s also searches for U.S.-manufactured goods of any kind, whether or not they are made by Amish.
But the Reading 78 was the first item the family-owned hardware store decided to manufacture on-site rather than turn to imported knockoffs after the original U.S. manufacturers died off. In this case, it was able to buy some of the original molds and tooling dies.
“It’s pretty much a bulletproof design,” Kirkpatrick says as he takes time out from a drill press to explain some of the 44 steps involved in making each Reading 78.
This room in the warehouse is crowded with drill presses, each equipped with a jig designed just for that step.
There are 32 parts in the apple peeler, including reduction gears, that move two tiny knife blades around the spinning apple at lightning speed with just a few cranks of the handle attached to the main gear. It weighs 6 pounds, and its parts are cast iron.
Some of these components need a little extra machining. The tiny pieces of blued steel have to be honed into knife edges. Holes have to be exactly drilled and threads cut into them to accept bolts for the final assembly.
Each one has to be tested, says Miller, and, if necessary, adjusted — as evidenced by a bag of apples on the test bench and wastebasket of skins below.
All of this takes judgment, skill and patience. But it gets done in 48 minutes.
“I had a great teacher,” says Kirkpatrick, nodding toward Miller, his Amish mentor for the past 18 months.
The result is a machine that is three to four times faster than its Chinese-made rival and about four times more expensive. But it won’t likely break down, at least in your lifetime.
“The problem is there are so many hand steps that we end up with a peeler that costs $129,” explains Galen Lehman, president of the company, who accompanied a visitor to the workshop recently.
“The Chinese peelers are all under $29,” he says. “But ours is a pleasure to run. When a customer comes in, we say, ‘You choose.’”
Lehman’s once sold thousands of the devices every year, but the demand has declined to a few hundred a year now.
On this day, Miller is making butter churns. He has been running the shop for 12 years, and whatever he does he makes look easy. Assembling the churns appears to be a much simpler process than making the Reading 78, but it still requires precision work on a drill press in a workshop adjoining Kirkpatrick’s.
The one-gallon glass bottle churns come with a sturdy hand crank and nylon gears that convert the turn of the crank into a higher-speed whir of the churn paddle.
The company sells more than 300 churns a year, at $125, says Glenda Lehman Ervin, vice president of marketing and Galen Lehman’s sister. Most of the sales are through the store’s catalog, she says.
At another workbench, Miller has laid out a disassembled grain mill and recalls the hectic days leading up to the turn of the century and the mounting fears about a computer-fostered Y2K disaster.
“At one point, I was 1,300 backordered,” he sighs. “I could not keep up.”
Galen Lehman designed the mill himself, ordering its cast aluminum body from a small foundry, its hardened steel shank and bronze bushings from another company. Final assembly is done at the Lehman shop.
Though it might resemble some sort of meat grinder to most city folk, it’s designed to crack and mill grains, seeds and beans, including coffee beans, and can be easily adjusted from coarse to fine. The machine has the look and feel of quality. Its heavy cast-iron burrs have been slightly machined, noticeable only to the touch.
Though there are no panic orders these days, sales of the $180 mill hover near 400 as the year ends, says Glenda Lehman Ervin.
The company’s ability to tap into the rich Amish tradition of craftsmanship grows out of its decades-long commitment to providing the conservative community with old-fashioned products for its way of life.
Today, it’s a symbiotic relationship, each side benefiting. Lehman’s is an outlet for Amish-made goods, “providing a viable revenue stream for them,” explains Glenda Lehman Ervin.
There is also a certain respect for the Amish. Even as the hardware store becomes a retailing giant — for example, doubling its showroom space this year to more than 30,000 square feet — it is closed on Sundays and has no evening hours.
Lehman’s markets itself as the source of everything you might need for a non-electric life — a necessity for the Amish, but a nostalgic fantasy for the bulk of out-of-town shoppers who swarm through the quarter-mile (they measured it) of displays in the new showrooms.
The tradition goes back at least to 1955 when Jay Lehman, father of the company’s current leadership, bought the combination hardware store and gasoline filling station that had been in business since 1915.
His plans to continue serving local Amish farmers soon hit supply snags, however. Traditional products — such as wood- and kerosene-fired cook stoves — were disappearing. Their manufacturers were going out of business or switching to modern products to stay alive.
For example, after Cleveland-based Perfection Stove Co. stopped making kerosene kitchen stoves, Jay Lehman had to develop a new supplier. He located a manufacturer in South America.
Closer to home, he had to arrange for special runs of U.S.-made black cast iron wood-burning parlor stoves because the Amish would accept only black stoves. He kept them supplied but had to buy the stoves by the truckload, typically a three-year supply.
Then came the energy crises of the 1970s.
“The oil embargo put us on the map,” said Jay Lehman, 78, who still works at the store, though he is officially retired. “We were just an ordinary little hardware like every town had a little hardware back then.”
Natural gas shortages on top of the Arab oil squeeze created a huge new market for wood stoves — stoves for which few but Lehman’s had a solid supply.
Sales over the Web are growing at the rate of about 10 percent per year and could surpass those of the store’s much-loved catalog. The Internet sales are worldwide, said Glenda Lehman Ervin. Lehman’s is committed to its high-tech shoppers, some of whom are, in fact, missionaries.