Forty-two participants from 15 states and all four coasts gathered in<\/p>\n
Buffalo in mid-October for a state-of-the-art instruction course in<\/p>\n
the inspection, care and repair of classical lighthouse lenses. Hosted by<\/p>\n
the Buffalo Lighthouse Association, the three-day course brought together<\/p>\n
most of the nation’s top lighthouse lens and lantern room experts and<\/p>\n
students from the National Park Service, Coast Guard, Bureau of Land<\/p>\n
Management, and non-government lighthouse sites and lighthouse organizations.<\/p>\n
The course included two days of classroom instruction and a training day<\/p>\n
that included work with a fourth-order bivalve Barbier, Beard et Turenne<\/p>\n
lens in the historic 1833 Buffalo Light, emergency repairs to ameliorate<\/p>\n
litharge failure in the bulls-eyes of a third order Chance Brothers lens at<\/p>\n
the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, and inspections of a<\/p>\n
fourth-order fixed lens at Buffalo’s Coast Guard base and a fifth-order<\/p>\n
fixed lens at the historical society museum. Museum curators also made<\/p>\n
their extremely rare, early 19th century Argand-Lewis lens, one of only two<\/p>\n
in America and the only one in a public collection, available for inspection.<\/p>\n
Instructors for the Lenses and Lanterns II training course, co-organized by<\/p>\n
the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center (HPTC)<\/p>\n
and the American Lighthouse Coordinating Committee (ALCC), included<\/p>\n
nationally-respected lampists Jim Woodward, CWO Joe Cocking and Jim Dunlap,<\/p>\n
as well as metalwork experts Gary Knappenberger and Alex Klahm, lens<\/p>\n
historian Thomas Tag, U.S. Coast Guard Curator Gail Fuller, International<\/p>\n
Chimney Corp. lighthouse project manager Joe Jakubik, and lighthouse site<\/p>\n
leaders Lee Radzak (Split Rock), Don Hampton (Ponce de Leon). Sessions also<\/p>\n
were led by ALCC president Mike Vogel, who distributed an updated version<\/p>\n
of the ALCC’s national lens inventory, and NPS HPTC director Tom McGrath,<\/p>\n
who organized the instruction program with early assistance of Cullen<\/p>\n
Chambers of Tybee Island Lighthouse, who had hosted the first such lens<\/p>\n
session in Florida nine years ago.<\/p>\n
Participants took home several print and electronic tools from the<\/p>\n
conference. Lens restoration specialist Dan Spinella, who participated as<\/p>\n
an instructor long-distance from Florida, debuted and distributed a new<\/p>\n
40-minute “Lighthouse Illumination Technical Edition” video that drew rave<\/p>\n
reviews, and will be marketed soon. Dan also produced an 18-minute video on<\/p>\n
replacement optics especially for the conference. In addition to the ALCC<\/p>\n
National Lighthouse Lens Survey in print form, students and instructors<\/p>\n
alike also received a CD-ROM with speaker-provided course materials and<\/p>\n
reprints of items ranging from the ALCC lens position paper to the entire<\/p>\n
Historic Lighthouse Preservation Handbook, and a new Coast Guard CD-ROM<\/p>\n
debuted by Gail Fuller that includes, among other things, the Coast Guard’s<\/p>\n
historic lighthouse records in searchable form. Not only that, they got to<\/p>\n
sample true Buffalo-style chicken wings at the Anchor Bar, where they were<\/p>\n
invented.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Forty-two participants from 15 states and all four coasts gathered in Buffalo in mid-October for a state-of-the-art instruction course in the inspection, care and repair of classical lighthouse lenses. Hosted by the Buffalo Lighthouse Association, the three-day course brought together most of the nation’s top lighthouse lens and lantern room experts and students from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alcc-national-park-service"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alpenalighthouse.org\/michiganlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}