Museum of Handcar Technology LLC

26911 Ruether Ave, Suite P
Santa Clarita, CA 91387

Todd Clark

todd@handcar.com

Telephone: (661) 600-7590

One of the more interesting tasks is fabricating our handcar axles.  On a conventional car the axle is a solid round rod.  This is not an efficient design as it makes the car quite heavy.  For the touring handcar we use a hollow axle that is made by using a tube in the center, with axle stubs on each end.  To accomplish the combining of pieces, liquid nitrogen is used to freeze the axle pieces so they shrink just enough to fit into the tubes.  There is only a few seconds of work time before the stubs expand, locking them in place.

Building handcar wheel centers is not a simple exercise.  Each wheels is made up of 18 pieces of precision cut top grade hard maple and white ash lumbers. 

The diameter is carefully cut with a table saw, then finished using a modified sander.



Handcar Tourism Demonstration Event

 tclark September 16, 2020

In September 2020 we traveled to Ely, Nevada and hosted a tourism demonstration event to test our concept. The event advertised through Facebook was a success with participants traveling from the Salt Lake region of Utah and from Las Vegas.  Customers were so excited that they had no problem driving nearly 300 miles to take part in the event.  This video shows some of the participants as they roll across the Nevada’s Great Basin.  We gave all proceeds to the Nevada Northern Railway as a gratitude of our thanks for allowing us the opportunity to test and develop our handcars unimpeded across their railroad.