Before we started building our new boat we had to take care of the
first things first, we got a motor. The motor we found was a
non-working out board from the sixties that had the power of five
horses to drive its mighty propeller. It was powder blue and
magnificently styled like everything in the sixties with lots of
extra chrome and ridges just for show. Beyond not running the other
major drawback to this motor was that there was a huge lock through
the mounting plate that had been used to secure it to the back of a
boat. This unit may have been stolen because it had the lock still
locked and a chunk of wood that look a lot like it could have been
from the back of a boat in a jagged square around the lock. Getting
rid of the wood was no problem but the lock was hard and really
really locked. Ryan and I started in trying to break it off with a
hammer but it appeared that the designers of this particular lock had
thought of that and designed the lock to withstand to feeble blows of
a couple of pre-teens and their hammer. We had seen stuff cut with
torches before so that was the next plan but we didn't understand
that we were looking for a specific type of oxy-acetelene torch
called a cutting torch. So we just got any old torch and the one we
ended up with was a MAPP gas unit suited for melting solder for
copper pipes but not hot enough to melt those pipes. We were trying
to melt something that was many times more durable than copper pipes
and so our little torch fire just got the metal red hot and we kept
the fire on it making it glow until the whole tank of fuel had been
run out of the torch. When that method left us high, and hot, and dry
we tried a hack saw, which can cut metal but just not the kind of
metal that the clever people over at the lock company put into the
lock. We had spent all day and were at the end of our patience when
my dad came home and asked how we were doing on our motor project we
told him everything we had done to get the lock off and he told us
why each one hadn’t worked and then he went and got a huge pair of
cutters known as bolt cutters and snipped the lock off in one
glorious snap. We still had to get the old fella to run but at least
our motor was free and ready to be attached to any boat we may ever
make. We worked on the mechanics of that motor, with a book even for
days to try and get it to light up and run but it never worked and we
abandoned that angle of our super sweet speed boat until the boat was
finished.
