Engine-eering 101

If there is one thing you have figured out from my blog here it is that I am a bit of a tinkerer…

Someone, a cousin I think, recently said I was the ‘family genius’, which made me grin. Sure, I might have a fairly high IQ, but I definitely prefer to think of myself as someone with an overdeveloped curiousity and underdeveloped sense of ‘maybe this is not such a good idea’. Actually the latter might apply to more than one member of my family.

Even when I was small (smaller, since I am still vertically challenged) two blocks of wood and a bit of string or a rusty nail had me turning over possibilities in my mind. At one point I even scavenged cut off bits of cloth from my Mother’s sewing projects to make clothes for my rather ratty teddy bear.

Now, go-karts or more properly soapbox’s were kind of a thing one Summer in our neighbourhood. I think it all started when we discovered putting an upside down dining room table on a baby buggy frame was a heckuva way to fly down the hill at Jagers! Haul the contraption up the hill, everybody jump on and grab a table leg and off we would go – Zoom!

Down the hill the buggy would fly until it hit the sandbox at the end of the hill, causing the table to fly a few feet and land with a satisfying crunch on the far side of the sandbox. Then, put it all back together and haul it back up the hill for another go!

This went on for a couple of days until one spectacular run when two of the legs broke off and a deep gouge appeared on the table top. Of course, boys being boys, we scattered immediately leaving Martin and George to face the music from Ko!

We built other soapboxes that Summer, simple chunks of plywood and two by fours with scavenged wheels but they didn’t quite match up to the buggy frame and dining room table! The buggy frame was hung up in the rafters of Ko’s garage and dining table propped up at the side of the house. We were also banned from using Jager’s hill for our runway.

There were few alternative hills in our neighbourhood. The driveway from Hutchins, past Lowes to the Island Highway, which was rejected simply because coming out of a blind driveway at Mach 1 on a soapbox directly onto a busy highway might not be too safe. There was another laneway from the highway to near Pfleger’s with the acceptable 45 degree down angle but at the bottom of the hill was a massive maple tree just a few feet from the landing area. This was also abandoned after Clay, aboard his trusty mustang bike decided to try the hill from the very top, impaling himself and what was left of the bike about 6 feet up the maple tree (I believe he had achieved Earth’s gravity exit velocity at that point).

Besides dragging a soapbox down the highway half a mile just to take a run down a very steep hill and sterilize yourself on a maple tree didn’t sound like a lot of fun! We needed to find a way to motorize our soapbox so it would run on the flats, preferably at the highest rate of speed possible!

Now my Dad had just bought a new lawnmower, after years of us kids pushing a handmower over the scabillion acres of lawn at our house. I looked at Clay and Clay looked at me, and off he scampered to ‘borrow’ his Father’s socket set.

Now lawnmowers at that time were of two types – ones that sat over the blade and spun it (vertical shaft) and those that used a pulley system to drive the blade (horizontal shaft). Horizontal shaft lawnmower motors were much easier to convert to go-karts, a simple pulley system and off you went. I think I read this in an old dog-eared Popular Mechanics magazine somewhere.

Sadly Father’s new lawnmower was of the vertical shaft variety, requiring a way to convert it to drive the wheels from a horizontal plane. I thought about this while Clay was retrieving the necessary tools.

And then I had an Eureka! moment (see my underdeveloped personality trait above). My middle brother, JL, had a gramaphone of very unknown vintage under his bed upstairs. It still worked, sort of, well enough for him to crank up a Led Zep album or two for some tinny acoustics. If you think about it a gramaphone has a crank on the side and a vertical shaft to spin the record. And somewhere in the middle there MUST be a gear that converts horizontal to vertical. I bet you see where I am going with this…

In short order the ‘guts’ of the gramaphone were displayed on the picnic table with the lawnmower motor gleaming beside them. Then it was a simple task to bolt a pulley onto the crank arm shaft and the lawnmower motor to the record spindle. Done!

We did fasten the motor down tightly on the soapbox, noting that it kind of sagged in the middle. Then drawing straws I got to take the first run. With his foot wedged under the front passenger side wheel of the kart, Clay braced against what was coming.

I turned and with a mighty yank on the starter cord the lawnmower engine roared to life, flinging Clay back assward as I shot about 40 feet down the driveway! Then disaster as the mechanism from the gramaphone gave weigh and shot shrapnel into the bushes at the front of the house. I killed the motor, sadly looking at the smoking bits halfway to the beach.

On the grass Clay writhed in agony at his gashed and twisted ankle. I remember we ended up telling his Mother he slipped on the rocks while running on the beach. I for my part assembled what I could of the gramaphone and slipped it back under JL’s bed before he got home from work.

Amazingly the lawnmower motor was unscathed. I quickly reassembled the lawn mower and pushed it back into the carport where it had originally been.

Then I headed for the beach.

That evening at dinner, my all-seeing Father, in the middle of his pork chop, looked over at me intently, “You missed a mounting bolt on the lawnmower. It better be PERFECT when I mow the lawn tomorrow!”

It was.

(btw this might come as a bit of a revelation to my brother, who spent some time trying to figure out why his gramaphone never worked after that day…)