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Despite what you may have heard, the Amish aren’t against technology. Communities adopt new gadgets such as fax machines and business-use cellphones all the time—as long as the local church approves each one ahead of time, determining that it won’t drastically change their way of life.
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So it is with the Amish horse-drawn buggy. You might have thought the technology inside this 1800s method of transportation stopped progressing right around then. Instead, buggy tech keeps advancing, and buggy makers have become electricians and metalworkers to build in all the new tech you can’t see under the traditional black paint.
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One builder in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was rather busy when we spoke. In a half-hour, four people called in to discuss orders. Amish people often shy away from using their names and businesses in publication, but one of the shop’s builders was happy to talk about all the new systems being developed for this old technology.
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Brakes
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Buggy brakes are automotive-style, non-powered drum or disc brakes mounted to two wheels. When a driver wants to stop, he or she halts the horse using the reins and halts the buggy by stepping on the brake pedal so that it doesn’t run into the horse. Our builder estimates 90 percent of buggy buyers stick with drums, in part because of the old-fashioned aesthetics—braking systems on buggies are very visible—and partly because all drum components can be made in Amish communities.
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“Back in the ’60s, a local Amish man started going through junkyards and getting the old seven-inch VW brakes,” our builder says, “salvaging them, repairing them, and cleaning them up and retrofitting them to buggies. After a while, he started getting good castings made. Now all the buggy brakes are manufactured by buggy shops.”
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Builders cast the drums in steel and the backer plates and shoes in an aluminum-tin alloy. “We’ll buy the castings, and we’ll machine, we’ll drill the holes, we’ll process them and install the components,” he says. “We actually bond our own shoes. We buy brake linings from a brake company in Ohio.”
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The few disc brakes used on buggies are off-the-shelf parts bought from outside Amish communities that usually were manufactured for dune buggies. For both drums and discs, the brake master cylinder, which moves the hydraulic fluid that actuates the brakes, is mounted underneath the body near an Amish-made pedal assembly with a foot pedal that pokes up through the floor into the interior. The master cylinders are made of anodized aluminum at an Amish shop, also in Ohio.
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Electrical
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States with large Amish populations, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, have laws that require buggies to light up when sharing public roads with automotive traffic. Which means these old-fashioned vehicles have electrical components.
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“Ninety-nine percent of buggies are built with a dash—a console on the front panel—and in that switch box are all the switches you need,” says our builder. “We have headlights, taillights, interior lights, and a turn-signal switch.”
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Shops buy LED components and assemble systems based on a customized turn signal developed by Lancaster County’s Amish builders 50 years ago. It’s a pedestal lamp with an amber headlight on the front and a red taillight on the back, one lamp for each side of the buggy. Bulbs stay on low-beam during normal use, but flicking a turn signal toggle switch activates a brake-light-style system that turns on the high-beams. There’s your Amish turn signal: a buggy whose left-side headlight and taillight are brighter than their right-side counterparts is about to turn left.
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To power these lights, batteries are all over the place. “For many, many years, we just simply used a standard deep-cycle marine battery because everything was incandescent, and we needed more power,” says the builder. Nowadays, they use cordless-tool batteries. A single 20-volt/6-amp battery, the type that powers an electric drill, runs the whole electrical system for two to three hours on a charge. Those traveling for longer carry spare batteries.
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“There was actually an alternator system attempted in the last five years,” he says. “It worked about 60 percent, but it never took off.”
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Body
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The main body is fiberglass. It’s pre-manufactured off site and shipped to Amish builders across the country for finishing. They add aluminum components to areas that see a lot of wear, such as doorsills. Everything else is white oak or ash wood framing stretched over with fabric, plusher linings for interior surfaces, and a tough polyester for exterior surfaces, all to save weight.
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“A new technology is thermally modified wood,” our builder says. “Thermally modified is, basically, they cook the livin’ daylights out of it. Like a kiln. Your common dried lumber, they take it down to 10 to 20 percent moisture. Thermally modified is taken down to almost zero percent moisture. They just bake the moisture out of it, and then it’s stabilized and real hard to rot.”
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Tires and Wheels
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Amish buggies roll on either steel or solid rubber tires, but our builder says most use steel. Both are built in-house. “Your steel-tire buggy actually pulls easier than a rubber-tire one because of the compression of the rubber,” he says. “Now, if you’d have pneumatic tires it’d be different, but with a solid rubber tire, it has compression. Of course, the pro with rubber is that it’ll be quieter.”
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Rubber tires also stress the turning mechanism (the fifth wheel) harder, so brakes are mounted on the rear wheels if a buggy has rubber tires. Steel-tire buggies have the brakes on the front wheels because the sliding of metal on the road takes some of the stress off the fifth wheel. For the wheels mounted within the tires, they’re wood, steel, aluminum, or fiberglass.
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“I prefer the wooden wheel yet,” the builder says. “That’s my number-one choice, for several reasons. It’s quieter, and it’s repairable. If you bust a spoke or something, you can easily pop off a tire, replace a spoke, and pop it back together again.” In the past five years, Amish buggy builders have developed an automotive-style tubular-steel torsion bar suspension that mounts the body over traditional leaf springs or, more recently, air bags.
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As with car shopping, the first step is to choose a general model of buggy as a base to build on. You could opt for a two-seater, a four-seater, half enclosed, completely open, and so on. Then you pile on the options from the shop’s checklist. Even if you skip luxury options such as a propane-powered heater, cupholders, and a speedometer, a buggy is expensive.
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“Average cost of a buggy is, I’m gonna say, $8000,” says our builder. Families usually have several types at once, for different uses, and each one they buy outright with cash. “We actually looked into doing financing through the banks,” he says, “but we don’t have titles for buggies, so the banks are squeamish about it.” If somebody needs it, though, builders will finance a buggy for them without the banks.
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“A lot of people will get 20 or 30 years out of a buggy before they do any major rebuilding of it. There’s a strong demand for good used buggies because of youth. Most people will buy their 16-year-old son a horse, a harness, and a used buggy. And then we have people who trade in their buggy every five to eight years. It’s like the mainstream world. A lot of these buggies will be running 40 or 50 years, rebuilt several times.”
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This story originally appeared on Popular Mechanics.
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