The Shuttles

The shuttles are home, disassembled on the floor of the workshop, ready for cleaning and painting away the military look; no repairs needed except a few minor thing. SOme worn leather straps, a splintered board.

Damn bombproof swiss engineering. More, swiss mlilitary engineering. Much older than we thought, they were apparently produced in 1918. No rust no rot. They are as sound as the day they were first turned out of the factory.

These things are not the flimsy showing carts you see these days. "You buy this ship, treat her proper, she'll be with you for the rest of your life". You can see that they were meant to go through hell, and come out from it untouched. For a lifetime. Or,like in this case, more than one. The ad stated a weight of 70 Kg. First rule of cart ads: don't trust anything they say about weight. Whatever they say, may or may not bear some relation to the weight of the cart stripped of its weels, shafts, any easily movable accessory and cover, and may be a couple of not-too-essential boards for good measure. But my opinion is that the relation, if it exhists, is thin. We stripped them to the bone in preparation to scraping and repainting, but they ain't 70 bloody kilos, granted. Me and Eric can handle, lift, and flip over these things, but it is not a healthy sport, believe me. The Swiss army was clearly not made up of whimps like us. Those were the days were the carts were made of wood (mostly) and the men were made of iron. Tut-tut.

On the other hand, when they were assembled-for-trial in our yard, they were pretty easy to manouvre around. They are tiny and really agile, once they are allowed to stand like good decent fellows, instead of lounging upside down on a pallet, without weels (duh!).

I love how robust they are: I am absolutely confident that we will grow tired of rugged woodland paths long before the Shuttles will. The scantlings (to put it in ship terms) of these carts are terrific. Modern cars look like cheap tincans in comparison. Pins and clips are all chained to the cart to avoid loosing small parts in the grass. They have solid oak shafts for hitching a horse or a mule, and a single, shorter shaft for being pushed or pulled, or just manouvered around by a person. This shaft is stowed in its own compartment underneath, safely secured and out of harms way. They can be attached together so that one horse can pull them both. They have sturdy, no nonsense brakes (ever seen a Swiss mountain path?). Imagine a governess cart built like a tank, and you are getting close enough.

The Shuttles - in tandem

They smell like the back of every brocante shop I visited in my life. They cut a shabby figure in the garage of the retailer, piled over one another, weels off. Zoe lingered ghostly beside us "Did you pay money for this, sir? On purpose?" I don't know why all these shops smell the same all over Europe (can't grant for the rest of the world). I think it is a bottled "OLD CELLAR" scent that goes with the business. I love and hate this smell. It is the smell of old furniture waiting to be restored, and therefore very exciting to me. But it is also the smell of age-long, mummified disuse. It's a smell of dead things, left behind and abandoned. Time to brush the old dust from our Shuttles.

PS According to other sources this model is from 1940. I have no idea, not being in any way an expert or a collector of military mementos. WHo cares anyway. They serve our purpose to perfection, whatever their age!