Carpentry crew keeps old cable cars rolling

There’s a reason it costs $7 to ride a San Francisco cable car, and it has to do with things like mortises, tenons, dovetail joints, tapered beams and giant pieces of white oak that must fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.

“We make everything from scratch,” said master carpenter Luis Ferreira. “Nobody stocks these things. You can’t go down to Home Depot and buy a part for a cable car.”

And one false move with the power saw, he added, and it’s the end of the line. Not the line that runs down Powell Street. The other kind.

“If this blade went through you, you’d never even feel it,” Ferreira said, smiling as he stood beside a giant, no-nonsense power saw Tuesday and prepared to carve up a plank of oak into another one of the col-

umns, struts, beams and rails that make up the elegant thing of beauty known as Cable Car No. 56.

Every 50 years or so, a cable car must come in from the cold to the carpentry shop in Dogpatch, where nine carpenters spend six to 18 months taking it apart and putting it back together. Usually it takes more work than expected, for the same reason that most every repair job takes more work than expected. The cable car carpenters are most adept at the handyman’s fine art of shaking their heads woefully and speaking in low tones when inspecting a takenapart thing and reporting on all the damage therein.

With an old cable car, as with an old anything else, the culprit is the same.

“Water,” said Ferreira. “You know how water is. It gets into things.”

Water had certainly gotten into Cable Car No. 56, a century-old veteran of the California Street line. There were rotten places and crumbling places and falling-apart places. Parts of Cable Car No. 56 looked much like what a roofer shows you after making you climb the ladder and peek underneath cracked shingles.

For the next year or so, Ferreira and his colleagues will replace the works. Nearly everything is fitted and glued instead of nailed and screwed. With large boards of white oak increasingly scarce, Ferreira said, carpenters must glue smaller pieces together. The correct term in “laminate.”

But there’s no plywood. Never plywood. At the shop in Dogpatch, such a word does not exist.

The hardest part, Ferreira said, is getting the taper right on a roof beam. It slopes front to back and it also slopes side to side, ever so slightly, and the only way to shape it correctly is by instinct. Fortunately, Ferreira said, it’s not unlike putting together the ribs of a wine barrel.

“I’m from Portugal,” Ferreira said, smiling. “I know wine barrels.”

It’s also fun, he said. Ferreira used to build houses and apartment buildings until landing the cable car gig a few years ago. Cable cars, unlike houses, move around and tend to make people smile. He said it was “an honor and a joy” to work on them.

The latest cable car to get the Dogpatch makeover was No. 12, which emerged from its date with the cosmetic surgeons in June. In all, there are 40 cable cars operating on three lines. The fleet travels half a million miles and carries 7 million passengers a year.

Muni long ago conceded that it charges the $7 fare — which is more than three times the cost of a regular $2.25 Muni fare — because tourists will pay it. The $7 fare should be good for perhaps two more years, a Muni spokesman said. After that, prepare to dig deeper still.

This weekend, those cable cars not in for angioplasty will be on duty for Muni Heritage Weekend, the annual celebration of an agency that doesn’t always find itself being celebrated. Joining the cable cars will be the antique F-line streetcar fleet, and some of the streetcars — including 104-year-old Streetcar No. 1 and the open-air “boat car” from Blackpool, England — will operate free of charge.

Also free will be rides on a collection of historic buses that will welcome passengers in front of the San Francisco Railway Museum at Market and Steuart streets.

No rain is predicted for the weekend, which means that the water that gets into cable cars won’t, for the time being. Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein @sfchronicle.com

Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle Carpenter John Barberini works on a cable car at the Muni repair shop in S.F.’s Dogpatch neighborhood.

Photos by Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle John Barberini works in the shop in Dogpatch. The carpenters typically spend six to 18 months getting an old car in tip-top shape.

Bryant Cao (left) and John Barberini work on a cable car. Many replacement parts must be made by hand because they are not commercially available.

Barberini is part of a crew of nine carpenters that work at the Muni cable car repair shop.