Masonry Magazine October 1992 Page. 20
cutters and robot fillers and sealers and sorters
With an engineer's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the younger Wright designs many of the levels himself. Among his latest projects is a blend of structural foam and polystyrene that he says will make wood levels obsolete.
Pugel used the traditional warm wood, its curved glass vials set in opposing pairs to give the best reading on either edge.
Szewczyk, 58, sees their survivors. Universal has been sold and moved out to Fredonia but he still ministers to wounded levels in his repair shop.
Some have had their vials shattered in a fall or their true line lost to warping. Some carry scars where masons knocked mortar off their trowels.
Some plainly went wrong from the start, their metal frames too soft or their bubbles too big or their material too easily warped.
In dealing with the makers, an outsider might have trouble telling who, in talk or in action, is on the level.
Nostalgia tugs back to the old-timers and their glass vials, bedded with plaster in mahogany. Progress points toward the innovators, with their plastic and extruded aluminum and plexiglass, lowcost and durable.
Matt Pugel, for one, says that most levels aren't made too well these days. He's 85 years old, and he fashioned levels for almost seventy years, inventing a vial that still anchors the top lines of wood levels. He saw American life change in that stretch. People started making compromises for savings or ease.
Tool of the Trade
Egyptians used the first levels in building the pyramids.
HERE'S A FIRST ASTONISHING FACT about levels: When you step onto the floor of your factory or office or living room or onto, for instance, a concourse at Mitchell Airport or even a runway, you change the tilt of it.
Egyptians made the first step and simplest levels about 1100 BC, and those levels still are good for a decent reading today. The pyramid builders started by boring holes in boards and filling them with water. If the water slopped over when they laid the board on a surface, they could judge which way the surface pitched.
Their later, A-shaped level, its legs set on a surface with a plumb bob hanging on a line from the apex, judged surfaces well into the 19th century.
The man who popped the first bubbles into levels in 1666, Thevenove of France, called the fluid in their vials the "spirit." His medium for the bubble was red wine, chosen for its color and resistance to freezing.
Spirit levels found wide use in the early 1800s. Within the next century, workers could measure a slope with an adjustable level, check two sides of a frame at once with a cross-test level, test a surface with a round bullseye level or check the straightness of a foundation with a line level.
From ten foot drywall levels and four foot mason's levels to two inch pocket levels, the measuring devices have become tools of most trades. Nowadays, ethyl and synthetic alcohol usually carry the bubbles, although government contracts often prescribe ether, which is lighter and more delicate.
"If I had used ether," says Matt Pugel, who designed and built levels for more than forty years. "I would have gotten closer readings-and I would have done a lot of sleeping on the job."
Bubbles in vials settle at the top of a gentle curve, as the fluid around them sinks with gravity. With the bubble perfectly centered on a test block, a worker (or, these days, often a machine) paints fine lines on either side of the bubble.
Best levels can detect bump of a human hair
The most finely honed levels can detect the bump of a human hair under a table a mile long or the pressure of a foot on an office floor.
Precision milled machinists' levels are the most accurate levels in routine use, since any irregularity in a part of a working machine can wear out bearings.
With two major manufacturers of levels here, Johnson Tool & Level Manufacturing and Empire Level Manufacturing. Milwaukee might be on the sharp edge of level-making... which means it echoes with competitive talk and marketing strategies.
Pugel, retired now, flatly says: "The worst level is plastic. You lay that level in the sun, it's gonna warp."
Pugel could paint lines on vials using a single strand of silk, and his most avid customers were tile and marble setters. Nowadays, he says, most of the true craftspeople are gone.
Randall Wright, who runs the Empire Level Co. in Wauwatosa, says he understands why Pugel swears by old wood levels and condemns plastic Continued on Page 46
Better high tech levels
Randall Wright, 37, acknowledges that pressures to finish jobs fast have streamlined production and shaved standards. High tech levels, on the other hand, he says, have gotten better.
Wright's latest catalog features a plastic level held against a background of stars in space. The level's sculpted openings and plastic vial reflect the light of an unseen-and artificial-sun.
Among the selling points in that catalog are a top view vial and a torpedo shape for easy pocketing, both innovations that Matt Pugel helped introduce decades ago. He worked then with Harry Ziemann, Wright's creative and exacting grandfather, and with Wright's father. Don, who invented a plastic, snap-in vial with a barrel shaped inside that allowed Empire to replace two vials with one.
No matter what evidence Wright or anyone else shows him, Szewczyk isn't buying the modern line. His experience as a carpenter and as a work-about tells him to trust the feel of something more than the description of it.
"You've gotta have a feel for this stuff," he says, "especially on the repair."
As for the quality of furnishings and walls and buildings and roads put straight by levels, well. Szewczyk can't predict how well the recent crop, defined increasingly by tight deadlines and flexible plastic, will hold up.
But this much he can say: For more than 150 years Milwaukee's structures were built with old-fashioned levels. And a good number of them still stand firm.
REPRINTED, with permission, from the Milwaukee Journal...
20 MASONRY-SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 1992