Hubert Beach has been a gearhead his whole life.

“I’ve been turning a wrench since I was 13,” he says. Back then he fixed everything from bicycles to cars. Today, he works on equipment that’s a little larger.

Beach does periodic maintenance on the machinery in the Chestnut Square bowling alley. Pins aren’t resetting properly? Beach fixes the pinsetter. When the ball return breaks, it’s likely Beach who ends up making it work again. Chestnut Square has a couple of other people who can handle repairs, but Beach says most of the major maintenance is done by him.

Beach has been that guy since Chestnut Square opened. Before that, he built semiconductors at Applied Materials. Before that, he served in the U.S. Air Force, as an aircraft engine technician. Compared to some of those engines, he says as he gestures toward the pinsetters, “These are a piece of cake.”

That’s mechanically-speaking, of course. There are some added wrenches thrown in that keep his work at Chestnut Square from being a cakewalk. For one, when working on jet engines you don’t typically have to worry about having other jet engines turned on nearby. The back of Chestnut Square’s bowling alley, Beach says, can get pretty loud.

“It’s right at maximum decibels,” he said. “I stay on that side of the wall,” meaning the shop area away from the machines, “when I can. If you try to talk on the phone while people are bowling, you can’t hear anything.”

Earlier this particular morning, Beach was fixing the ball lift, working on “the clutch on the lower tire that starts [the ball] whipping up and back around” to the bowlers at the front end of the lanes. He fixes the ball returns all the way through, from the pit where the ball is swept into the return to the exit near where the customers are and everything in between, including the beneath-the-lane tunnels.

Asked how much room is down there, Beach shakes his head. “Not a whole bunch,” he says.

As with many pieces of equipment with so many moving parts, Beach says it might be easier to list “what won’t go wrong” than what commonly breaks. But he says the Chestnut Square machines at least break down in reliable ways. He’s never had trouble getting the parts necessary and putting them on when something does break.

Beach says kids jamming the ball return buttons at the same time and clogging up the system are among the common user errors he encounters. There are also people who throw their second ball too early, so that it hits the sweep as it’s down. Eventually, Beach says, the force of those impacts will cause it to break, and then he’s got some work to do in order to replace it.

Piece of cake.

We welcome your comments on our stories but will publish only those that do not violate our comment guidelines