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Wonder Will Always Get Us There
I think I was eleven or twelve years old when one of my younger brothers and I decided that we could fix our broken lawnmower. My recollection is that it was the first gas-powered lawnmower we owned, and it was given to us by someone who had purchased a new one.
I remember the taxing work of using the push-style lawnmower, the kind powered the force of the person pushing it.
Being pre-teen boys, however, our intention wasn’t to fix the lawnmower to spare ourselves the difficult work of returning to the push-style. We’d grown up with that, so going back to doing it that way didn’t require any imagination.
Our plan was ambitious: turn an old lawnmower into a motorized go-cart. For weeks, we worked on building a heavy, sturdy wooden frame that we’d already tested by jumping on it. We repurposed the lawnmower’s wheels, attaching them to the frame, and engineered a steering mechanism that, in theory, was quite clever.
Steering relied on a plastic-covered cable tied to either side of the cart. Pulling the cable one way or the other would cause the front wheels to turn — though not nearly enough to navigate a 90-degree street corner. When faced with tight turns, we had to get off and manually shift the body another 45 degrees to keep going.
The big hill near our home was great for downhill tests. Our craft succeeded amazingly on the way down. Once on flat ground, and with no engine, we took turns pushing each other around on the heavy cart.
Fun? Absolutely.
Practical? Not even close.
That’s what had us so excited about the motor. We worked all morning one Saturday figuring out how to take apart the two-cycle engine. We exposed the piston and saw that it was seized, probably due to a lack of oil in the fuel mixture but we were guessing at all of it.
The end of that story is we got the piston moving again but after reassembling the engine it would never spark to life. Still, our friend-powered go-cart continued to serve our purposes on multiple occasions that summer.
Funny enough, both of us grew up to study engineering in school. I bet you didn’t see that one coming.
