Beer We Go!
Belt Sander Races Hop Into Another Community Celebration
TOWN HILL—The racers have a year to fine-tune their belt sanders, but then the unthinkable might happen. And it did.
“Oh, the decapitation!” moaned Bar Harbor’s Mike Staggs after the fourth head fell off a contestant’s belt sander race entry Sunday afternoon at Atlantic Brewing and Mainely Meat BBQ on the Knox Road.
“Four decapitations!” emcee Bryce Lambert happily bemoaned. “Oh, that was a rough ride.”
It wasn’t an easy race, but it was a fun and slightly macabre one. And with 20 competitors in the field, it was just one of many in the 90-minute-long event that celebrates the almost-end of the tourism season, weirdness, beer, barbeque, and community.
The well-wishers and the racers clustered around a long wooden track, lofting beers and cell phones as heat after heat of belt sanders—those mechanical tools used for sanding rough surfaces, trimming to scribed lines, and leveling surfaces—raced against each other.
Weird? Only in a good way. But it’s become a Town Hill tradition.
During the races, two belt sanders are lifted and carried to the track, plugged in to long orange extension cords and wait for the switch that will turn them both on at once. It’s basically drag racing with power tools. Bryce Cough, who years ago built the track the sanders race down, lets them go at the start of the race. The machines grind toward their wins or losses as a crowd of spectators cheer them on.
Would it be Kebo Clown or Party Animal? Duck U or Captain America? Sukke or Joker Slim Jim? Each heat lasted about 2.4 seconds according to the boy who’d started to time them until he went off to hang out with his friends. Occasionally there was a photo finish that required reviewing Brewer Jon Hill’s phone and some spectators’ phones too.
But always, at the end of the wooden tracks, they smack into grain bags and are unplugged. That is unless they stop halfway down instead.
Every year, Cough stores and repairs the track. This year, he covered it with a tarp before the race because of the torrential downpours this weekend. The tropical storm took down trees and powerlines throughout the island. But the track? It survived. Just like the races: it’s a tradition that happens year after year, although maybe not quite as long as Lambert said it was lasting.
“Welcome to the 26th year!” he called.
Two races later? “Welcome, to the 30th year!”
Almost near the end? “Welcome, to the 70th year!”
It is probably the 19th annual for anyone who is counting. It didn’t happen in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The Belt Sander Races are friendly but fierce competition in which decorated belt sanders are raced down two tracks in a double elimination bracket. This years' theme is Carnival! The winners receive prizes, glory, and eternal bragging rights,” said Allie Sasner, Atlantic Brewing Company’s marketing and administration manager.
The money raised goes to the Beth C Wright Cancer Resource Center.
Some contestants dressed up like wicked clowns from a Stephen King novel. Some wore Carhartts. Emcee Bryce Lambert led the crowd in chants of Sparkle Farts, last year’s favorite named contestant, even though the sander wasn’t there this year.
“Sparkle!” Lambert yelled into his microphone again this year
“Farts!” the viewers shouted.
“Sparkle!”
“Farts!”
Sasner even created a special sparkling prize for the fan favorites in honor of Sparkle Farts. That’s just the kind of event this is. It’s one that’s competitive, but fun. One that takes its racing seriously until it doesn’t. One where everyone cheers for everyone else, where people laugh easily and ooh and ah over their neighbors’ successes with some beer, barbeque, and bantering thrown in.
So, basically it’s community, the kind of community you want to come back to year after year.
Decorations weren’t just in the air and on fences and bodies. Some belt sanders were all decked out in polka dots and some were a bit more ghoulish for this year’s theme, which was carnival. Katie Rodgers, Emilie Jagot, and Arielle Bullard of Mainely Meat served barbeque to all the spectators and some of the racers, and they also decorated the area for the carnival theme.
Belt sanders stall out and complete slow-motion roll-overs while others zoom to the finish line so quickly that spectators can blink twice, take a sip of Real Ale, and miss them. Racers try to pick up points. What is it that makes a winning racer?
“I noticed you have five grit on your belt,” one racer said to Steven Glass as they unplugged after a heat.
“It’s whatever was on there last,” Glass said as he unplugged his sander and went back for another round.
Prizes were given to best looking belt sander (Lynn Staggs’ A Lion, No Tiger, One Bear, Oh My!) and the crowd favorite/Sparkle Farts Award (Party Animal) as well as first and second place.
Mark Ehrhart, arms pumping in the air and with a bit of a celebratory two-step dethroned Glass despite an early race where his sander, Speed Freak, flew off the track into the gravel below. Glass received second place. It would have been Glass’ fourth win.
Ben Prisby helped Glass decorate his entry this year: Elephants on Parade. The final race was between these giants in the Town Hill sander race lore, with Speed Freak handing Elephants on Parade its only loss early in the heats.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Atlantic Brewing Company’s website.
How to build a belt sander racer. Modifications are NOT allowed at the Bar Harbor race.
Last year’s story:
Lager Than Life: Belt Sander Races Brew Up a Good Time
Photos Shaun Farrar and Carrie Jones
I have another Substack which isn’t about Bar Harbor and isn’t news, but I wrote about the belt sander racers there, too. It’s more a piece about community. You can check it out if you want, but no pressure, obviously!