Darryl Hudson doesn't worry about staying cool in the summer. The Aiken machinist has dozens of fans shelved in his workshop office.
Most of them were made before World War I.
To the people in this area, Mr. Hudson is the bluegrass guitar player who holds an annual festival in his front yard.
At Savannah River Site, he is the machine shop quality assurance manager who is two years away from 30 years of service.
To museums and antiques collectors around the world, he is the guy who can fix it when no one else can.
Hudson's Custom Machine Shop is tucked away in the Aiken County countryside, a small building next to his house.
The 48-year-old moved there in 1990 with his wife, Phyllis, and constructed his workshop that winter.
"I just wanted a shop. I didn't know it was going to turn into what it's become," Mr. Hudson said.
What is has become is an eye into the past. He has more than 400 antique and vintage fans, built from the 1880s into the 1940s.
He collects more than fans; he also has heaters, irons, electric plugs, toasters and bottles. Old bottles got him into collecting as a youth.
It's a hobby that became a part-time career in antique repair and refurbishment. His main scope of work is producing parts that are obsolete.
What propelled him into the sideline work was his childhood fan that had been owned by his grandparents. He came across it in an attic.
"He was looking for a fan or two to keep his shop cool. Then he got the bug," Mrs. Hudson said.
Putting the fan back into operating condition sent him to flea markets in search of other old fans.
"These things are made really well," Mr. Hudson said. "Heavy cast iron. Things nowadays, when they quit running you throw them away and buy a new one. Back then things were made to be repaired and keep going."
He has repaired enough over the decades to know. Museums, including the Smithsonian, have given him work.
If you call Hamilton Beach to get certain parts for old malt mixers, the company will direct the call to Mr. Hudson. He stocks parts -- which he makes -- for the motors.
"People like to collect these now and put them in their kitchen," he said.
Mr. Hudson called the company to make sure he wasn't violating a patent by making the replacement parts. The company, he said, was happy to hear from him because they get calls daily from people wanting parts for their old mixers.
He has a few drugstore malt mixers in his collection, too.
How does he know what things that are more than 100 years old are supposed to look like? He has the original catalogs. Some of the catalogs are antiques themselves, more than 100 years old.
"I painstakingly go through a lot of trouble to restore some of this stuff," he said.
His wife said: "He's a conscientious worker in everything he does. He doesn't do something halfway. He does it for perfection. In his fans, when he first started with that, he did a lot of research and memorized a lot of stuff when he got interested in it."
He works at SRS full time, Mr. Hudson said, so he turns away a lot of work because he doesn't have the time to get to it.
"When people send me things, they don't want to wait four months to get it back. If I took everything that I was offered, I could make a full-time go of it," he said.
That's his plan: Retire after 30 years at SRS and then refurbish the antiques full time
"I think I was born 50 to 100 years too late. All of my interests are in the early electrical stuff, early mechanical stuff, old instruments," he said.
And bluegrass music.
Grass is blue
Mr. Hudson has been playing in bluegrass bands since 1983. His current group, Savannah River Bluegrass Band, has been together since 1997. It has three CDs and a touring schedule.
"We're getting some air play on bluegrass radio," Mr. Hudson said.
He plays guitar, which he taught himself as a youngster.
"Spent many hours at the edge of my bed when I was a kid," he said.
As a teenager, he was interested in Southern rock, such as the Marshall Tucker Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and even joined a few garage bands. Bluegrass didn't win him over until his college days.
Mr. Hudson attended Aiken Technical College, pursuing his mechanical engineer training. He worked his way through college at a country music radio station in Langley for three years. He took his school dance disc jockey skills into radio station WVAP as a walk-in, filling a slot in the morning programming.
"I didn't even like country music, I was a rock 'n' roller," Mr. Hudson said. "I used to hate listening to George Jones. Of course, country music back then was a lot different than what it is now. After a year or so, it started growing on me."
In a back room of the radio station was a stack of bluegrass vinyl records.
"I had always seen the Lewis Family on TV. I thought that was pretty cool music," he said.
He took the records home and listened, which led to his trying to imitate the music with his guitar.
That escalated into attending bluegrass festivals, meeting bands, playing with others and eventually creating bands.
Three of Mr. Hudson's early bands were named Heart of Dixie, Second Helping and Five of a Kind.
For 15 years, he played with George Pritchard.
"He was a local legend. He was the one that got Brenda Lee started in the music business," Mr. Hudson said.
Mr. Pritchard played fiddle on Savannah River Bluegrass Band's first album.
Some vintage guitars hang in Mr. Hudson's office. One belonged to his wife's mother, who sang and played on the radio in North Carolina. The matching mandolin belonged to his wife's father.
"Oddly enough, her parents played bluegrass," he said.
Mr. Hudson holds a bluegrass festival at his house near New Ellenton every October. About 10 bands come to play to a crowd of 300 people. Mr. Hudson cooks two pigs to feed the crowd.
His road is Bluegrass Drive. It was a dirt driveway until the 911 system was installed and the county made him name the road.
Being at the end of a dead-end road has gotten him some abandoned animals. A kitten named Pumpkin is now the "shop cat in training."
Mr. Hudson also has an 18-year-old parrot.
"He's in jail today because there's people coming over. He will bite," Mr. Hudson said. "He doesn't bite because he's mean. He just gets excited."
The parrot, which talks, offers company while he's in the shop.
Fandom
Mr. Hudson holds a different kind of gathering at his house every April. He opens his shop -- and yard -- to antiques collectors showing off their early electric-era gadgets.
"I call it my fan show. We have about 100 collectors from across the United States. They set up for sale or trade," he said.
The most valuable item in his collection is an electric fan made in 1882. The most interesting might be a heat-powered fan that helped heat houses by moving hot air away from wood-burning stoves.
Typically, the value is in pre-1900 items, he said. Fans from that era are worth hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars.
"It is just like guns or cars or coins," he said. The rarer it is, the more valuable it is.
Mr. Hudson restores the items by machining parts from blueprints. He has drawn every item he has ever had to repair. He has mass-produced some commonly broken items.
"My granddaddy was a machinist. When I was little, I used to stay with my grandparents a lot, so I grew up in a machine shop," he said.
He got his certificate in machine tool technology from Aiken Technical College. After a stint in a few machine shops, Mr. Hudson went to work at SRS at age 20.
"I worked out there as a machinist for a good number of years, and then back in 1989, I had a chance to get into quality control," he said.
He has been inspecting the parts coming out of the shop since.
His wife is a secretary at SRS. They met at work and have been married nearly 20 years. That anniversary will be New Year's Day.
Mrs. Hudson not only shares a connection with him in bluegrass but also collects glassware, candlewicking (a kind of embroidery), and cat figurines.
She said she will retire from SRS when her husband does.
"I'm glad he has a hobby," she said. "Some retired men have a hard time adjusting because they don't have anything to do. I don't have that problem."
Mr. Hudson's hobby didn't get him much notice until 1991. He did a repair job for a prominent collector in St. Louis who put Mr. Hudson's name on the Internet.
"I didn't know what the Internet was at the time. I didn't have a computer," he said. "I've never advertised. I do this as a hobby. My phone started ringing off the hook. I started getting calls from museums and private collectors all over the world."
He has his own Web site now, though.
Mr. Hudson is particularly proud of a job he did in 2007 for Hunter Fan Co., which was moving into a new plant in Dallas. The company has a long history and needed a repair on an 1886 ceiling fan, one of its originals.
The fan was going to be on display at the new plant, Mr. Hudson said, and the company also needed it as a pattern for replicas.
It took him 40 hours to put it back together.
The thank-you letter from the company is now part of his collection.
Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.
DARRYL HUDSON
BORN: Sept. 26, 1961, Augusta
EDUCATION: Aiken Technical College
FAMILY: Wife, Phyllis; three cats and one parrot
CAREER: Machinist at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions; owner of Hudson's Custom Machine Shop; guitar player for Savannah River Bluegrass Band
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012. All Rights Reserved.
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![Pumpkin, the "shop cat in training," hangs around Mr. Hudson's work space. The kitten was abandoned near Mr. Hudson's home. Jackie Ricciardi/Staff](http://chronicle.augusta.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/superphoto/editorial/images/spotted/83/838496.jpg "Pumpkin, the "shop cat in training," hangs around Mr. Hudson's work space. The kitten was abandoned near Mr. Hudson's home. Jackie Ricciardi/Staff")
