All that winter, Dad built and re-built lawnmower engines, discarding some parts, adding some others, tweaking and fine-tuning his creation. When he got it just right, he mounted it under a wooden milk crate in the stern of the boat. He cut a hole for the propeller shaft and connected everything all together. He bought a large, shiny prop and attached it. For steering, he fashioned a rudder and tiller system, as the prop couldn't turn like on a traditional engine. After months of work and false starts and problems and the stuff just plain not working, it was finally ready.
We traipsed to the dock and waited eagerly for the big maiden voyage. Our high spirits and noisy shouts of encouragement as well as Mom waving a bottle of Coca-Cola around to christen "The Six Nuts" attracted a great deal of attention at the dock. A crowd gathered around us and Mom, unwilling to actually break the pop bottle, uncapped it and spritzed the hull with the soda. The crowd applauded and we were all very proud. Some of the men it the crowd asked Dad about the engine - "What kind of engine is THAT?", they questioned eagerly. "Oh, it's a Le Lawn Muer" Dad replied easily. Dad made some final adjustments and nervously got ready to start the engine. He leaned over the milk crate and pulled the long lawn-mower-engine-starting-thing. The engine sputtered. Again, he pulled the start cord and again the engine sputtered and choked. He gave an even mightier heave and several things happened all at once:
The engine ROARED into life;
the boat shot forward like a jet;
Dad fell out of the boat;
and, just as quick as the boat started,
it stopped...
Dad, from his vantage point in the water, could see the propeller float to the bottom of the lake, ripped mercilessly from its union with the shaft. "Hmmm..." he said as he climbed onto the dock after retrieving both the boat and the propeller, " I guess I need a stronger cotter pin". The crowd agreed that that would surely fix the problem. So Dad fashioned a new propeller pin and got back in the water and dove under the boat and attached the propeller back on. He climbed out of the water and back into the boat and prepared to start the engine. Again he hunched over the starter cord, but this time he braced himself for the sudden movement if the engine actually started a second time. He pulled the cord, the engine started and the boat took off like a bat from hell...Dad clung briefly to the gunwale and then crawled to the tiller. The Six Nuts was speeding through the water at probably 20 knots; much too fast for the tiller to handle. As Dad yanked the tiller to the right, it came off in his hand, and he began to spiral in an endless circle, unable to control the boat. There was not only no effective way to STEER, there was also no way to SLOW DOWN...in the planning, it somehow got overlooked to include a variable speed throttle...the boat either went really fast, or not at all.
We looked on in horror...someone started to giggle...and soon we were all laughing uproariously while Dad struggled to stop the engine. He finally got it to stop and he fetched the oars and rowed resolutely back to the dock. When he got there, he was a bit out of breath from the exertion. We all waited expectantly to hear what he would say. "Well..." he said slowly, and then began to laugh, "I guess I need to fix that."
Although he tried for the rest of the summer and into the winter months, he was never able to resolve the steering/throttle issue. Luckily, we had a reversal of fortune, and Dad was able to buy a conventional boat engine and The Six Nuts was properly set to sail the next summer.
