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HOT SPRINGS – Harry McClung has a passion for an icon of the great American West – the stagecoach. The 81-year old Pine Hills resident started hand-building stagecoaches and wagons in the 1980’s. “It’s hard work,” he said as he described how he painstakingly cut tiny pieces of oak, which he culled from old dresser drawers. “I used a cast iron overhead foundry saw,” he said, “That was about 65 years ago, and I had to turn a crank to raise and lower the blade.”

Among the examples of the old west coaches are a replica of the Deadwood-Sidney coach, a “fancy” Reno coach, a sheepherders’ wagon, two covered wagons and a dirt wagon used for loading dirt at railroad construction sites in the 1800’s. McClung said the premiere stagecoach manufacturer in the 1800’s, Concord Stagecoach, was “the General Motors of the 1800’s.”

“I thought it would be neat to make one,” he said about the fire that ignited his passion. He had the blueprints to make a full size coach, but money was an object at the time so he decided to try his hand at building miniatures. He used different types of hardwoods for authenticity. “Oak is good for compression strength,” he said. The seats in the passenger coaches are made of leather with leather straps supporting the undercarriage of the Deadwood-Sidney coach. “On the real coaches, they used 16 layers of leather,” he said.

With each piece a work of western art and amazing detail, McClung chuckled about how his fingers were too big to do some of the finer detail work. “I cut some of the oak so thin you could see through it,” said McClung, explaining how he placed the tiny pieces of wood to craft it for the coaches. Each piece is hand-mortised with the dovetail technique used by craftsmen “back in the day.” For the steel parts, McClung used welding rods, which he hammered flat or bent where necessary.

On the Conestoga, or covered wagon, McClung used an old dishtowel he liberated from the kitchen and sewed to fit.

The coaches each took McClung about 250 hours to complete.

“I could only work on them three hours at a time”, he said, explaining that it was hard on his back to stand at the saw or drill press, or other tools for longer lengths of time.

McClung recently displayed his collection and gave a talk to the Jedediah Corral of Westerners history buffs and old west aficionados.

He laughed about being in Hollywood where he saw a movie being made with a stagecoach.

“The coaches stood still, but the wheels were spinning.”

So much for reality in the old west.