Local man up for challenge

Dewayne Boggs says he loves a challenge.
He must.
Surrounded by rusty metal gears, rods, and levers, the rural Portland man is attempting to recreate the workings of an oil well pumping mechanism at the Tri-State Gas Engine and Tractor Association’s show this week at the Jay County Fairgrounds.
“It’s authentic,” says Boggs. “It came off of a well here in Jay County.”
“It” is an Oklahoma No. 3 pattern pump jack, a relic from an era when oil wells dotted the rural landscape locally.
For years, visitors to the Oil Field Engine Society’s grouping of restored engines have asked how they were originally put to use.
Boggs hopes his reconstruction will answer that question.
Located just north of the O.F.E.S. engines and just south of the 4-H horse barns, Boggs’s project will link his 1890 Oil City engine with the pump jack.
But that link will take some doing.
When completed, it will work something like this: The Oil City engine, a relic of the oil fields, will be connected by a belt to a unit Boggs calls a “power.” The power’s gears are connected to an eccentric — a part that is out-of-round — which is connected via a long series of rods to the pump jack. Because of the way the eccentric rotates, the rods will have a back-and-forth motion that works the pump.
“Hopefully this is all going to work perfectly,” says Boggs, who works at Priority Plastics in Portland and who helped his father over the years with doing maintenance on local oil wells.
Not all of the interconnected contraption belongs to Dewayne and his wife Casey. The pump jack, built sometime between 1900 and 1925, has been in their possession about three years. The Oil City engine, which started its life as steam-powered and was later converted to natural gas, is theirs as well.
The “power” — which weighs in at 3,650 pounds — was contributed for the occasion by Fred Affolder and Orla Campbell and is from an oil well near Bryant. Richard and Donna Haffner made available an old wooden oil tank for the display.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Boggs was still hard at work, getting the various parts connected.
“They challenged me,” he says, “and I took up the challenge.”[[In-content Ad]]