Building Things

My first memories in life are of me watching and helping my dad fabricate things.  He built a ski boat from plywood and placed a 1952 Ford flathead engine from a wrecked pickup truck into it.  He followed what was known as the Great Lakes design during the process.  My uncle Frank also built a similar designed ski boat up in Sacramento.  Ski boats were not readily available, and besides that, my dad and uncle could never afford to buy one.  Back then, waterskiing was a brand-new sport with the skis being made of ash wood and bindings from inner tubes which tore a lot.

When I was a young adult, my dad bought a new fiberglass hull from Sanger Boats.  We then installed a 383 Chrysler engine from the family car a 1960 Desoto that I remember buying on Broadway Street downtown.  He looked at two different colored cars, a tomato soup red and a white one.  He chose white!  The boat had a “V” drive and a transmission!  The older boat had none, so we started the engine and turned it off to guide it.  Funny thing is, my dad wanted to put the electric seats from the Desoto into the boat, but after removing the front seats and seeing how heavy they were, he rightly quashed that idea.

The boat trailer is what we worked hardest on.  Instead of the using the old and pitted well pipes that were used for the older boat trailer, he bought channel iron to construct the new one.  In the dirt alongside of the house were some automobile leaf springs from the 1930’s.  They were too long to be used for the trailer, so my dad decided to cut them down to size!  It was nearly impossible to cut hardened spring steel, but we spent hours with a hack saw to successfully cut them.  I remember getting so tired cutting them by hand and I remember how hot it was to hold the hack saw.   Eventually we did get the sizes we wanted.

When it was completed, I learned to back up the trailer and boat down our driveway.  The trailer wheels over hung the concrete driveway two inches on each side.  I then had to turn it sideways and into the carport to park it underneath.   The carport had only two poles on one side, but that’s another story.