Friday, May 23, 2008
Retro rehab
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
Recent columns
They way Ed Elliott dotes over the old outboard motors that clutter his basement, it's easy to imagine how he became connected to these pieces of history.
You can see him as a kid with his grandpa, puttering around on a quiet lake in Wisconsin during a summer vacation. You can imagine him catching a few bass or pike, drinking a cold root beer and basking in the summer sun, and understand how these old engines bring back those rich memories.
And you'd be wrong.
"I just wanted more horsepower," Elliott says with an unapologetic chuckle.
And so it was that his desire to upgrade from a tiny outboard to one that was merely small launched him on what has become a consuming passion of refurbishing old outboards.
"It's not for the money," says Elliott, who along with his wife, Nancy, moved to Vinton seven years ago to be closer to a son who lives in the area. "It's not for retirement.
"I do it for fun."
A 72-year-old with a firm handshake and warm smile, Elliott estimates that he's worked on more than two-dozen small engines since he got started.
Some he sells.
Some he keeps.
When he's done, they all have one thing in common.
"You can put one on the back of a boat and go fishing," says Elliott.
Which is what Wayne McGhee did this past weekend with a 49-year-old 10-horespower Johnson he recently bought from Elliott for $350.
"I said: 'If I break down, will you come tow me in?'" said a laughing McGhee, who paired the engine with a 1960 johnboat. "He said he wouldn't but he'd fix it if I brought it back.
"We took it out on Smith Mountain Lake this past weekend and it seemed to do good."
Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, Elliott enjoyed the outdoors, but his family didn't have a boat. He bought his first outboard, a Martin 45, in the early 1970s because he didn't want to have to rent a motor when he went on his fishing vacations.
The 4.5-hp motor worked just fine powering small rental boats around the quiet lakes in the upper Midwest. But in the early 1990s Elliott decided he wanted a bigger outboard, so he bought a 1958 10-hp Johnson and refurbished it.
And he hasn't stopped since.
At present he's got about a dozen motors in his basement shop. He's also got parts. Lots of parts.
"I'm warning you," his wife says to a visitor about to descend into the shop. "It's pretty cluttered down there."
Elliott keeps many of his parts in Dutch Master and White Owl cigar boxes, close to 100 of which are stacked around the shop. Few of the boxes are labeled.
"Some of them are," says Elliott, who has smoked his way through all of those boxes. "But I pretty much know where everything is."
Elliott, who spent his career working in the auto parts industry and also was a career infantry officer in the Army reserve and National Guard, maintains a computerized list of his parts inventory.
"I have about 3,000 line items," notes Elliott, who keeps track of what he uses on note cards and then updates the computer list about once a year.
The parts inventory is large in part because Elliott has bought out parts supplies from dealers who have closed shop. If he doesn't have something, he can usually get it.
"Even on these older engines, you can get probably 70 to 80 percent of the parts new," he said.
If not, Elliott can almost always find it by probing other motor buffs, for whom his vast parts inventory is also a resource.
"I check the ads several times a day," says Elliott, who typically sends out a couple pieces a week.
Elliott acquires motors any way he can. Some come from associates in the business. Others he finds at estate sales, or at old marinas.
With old manuals as references, he takes his time working on the motors.
Rather than tearing an engine completely apart, he works component by component. He doesn't repaint engines or put on new decals.
"I prefer to call what I do refurbishing," he said. "Not restoring."
His most recent project was an 18-horsepower Evinrude that he is passing along to his granddaughter's husband, who is on his way this week to a lake trout derby in New York.
Typically he doesn't work on engines over 15 horsepower.
"If they're bigger, I can't lift them," he says.
Another recent project was a 53-year-old 10-hp Johnson. He replaced a number of parts on the motor, and the job took about 40 hours.
He's trying to sell it, and asking $350.
Elliott said his customers are anglers on a budget, and helping get them out on the water is one of the reasons he enjoys his hobby.
And because keeping it a hobby is a top priority, Elliott is quick to point out that he's not for hire if someone has an old engine and wants to get it going.
"I'll talk and I'll give them technical advice," he says. "I'll sell them parts and tell them where to get parts.
"But I'm not going to put a wrench to it."
Then it becomes work. And that's not the point.
