I may have posted on this thread a couple years ago , but I don’t want to go through it looking so here goes, maybe again:
First one I operated was Dad’s 1946 4.2 HP Champion model 1J – When I was 5 years old, he would go to the front of the 14′ cedar-strip boat and let me steer it. I still have that motor. It’s now unique because living in St Paul, he used to take it to the Champion factory in a suburb just north of St. Paul/Minneapolis for service and one time when it was there in the early 1950s, when he picked it up, at no cost to him, they had run it through the paint booth and put on new decals, so what was a silver motor is now a factory -painted blue motor!
The first motor I owned was a 1953 Champion 4LHD “Hydro-Drive” 8.5 HP that I got for $30 in 1961 when I was 14 and put on an 8 foot , 3 -point hydroplane I built in the basement from plans in a magazine. I was able to run that motor into the mid-1980s, because Lyle Swanson, who got the remains of the Champion factory parts when they went out of business had his stock and shop 20 minutes from the family lake place. When I was 14, I got really good at getting that motor going again after taking waves wrong with the hydroplane and dunking it. Photo below (taken in the mid-1960s) of it on the hydroplane after a dunk.
Dave
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