❖ NELLY R and her CLIFT ENGINE ❖ pop pop

 

"The very first engine I remember was a little two-cycle Gray painted blue. It was a single-cylinder job rated at three horsepower. The head and cylinder were all cast in one piece. There was a jolly little sparkplug that sat right slap-dab in the middle of what looked like a bald head. There was a carburetor or mixing bowl down alongside the crankcase. It was a long way away from its work. The pipe from this mixing bowl to the cylinder, as I remember it, was about an inch or inch and an eighth in diameter. This whole assembly was brass and it looked like an awful lot of hardware to get the job done.
          I don't remember the name of the man who owned the launch that had this Gray in it but on Sunday mornings when he had invited some guests down to go for a boat ride he would come down early in order to get this temperamental little Gray started and it was a real prima donna. Usually, it would start right off, he would let it bang away while it was tied up to the dock 'til everything was running fine and he knew it would operate perfectly when his friends arrived. For some reason, just before his guests appeared he would shut the thing down and, of course, you know what happened. When they showed up and were all seated in the boat this chap would latch onto the flywheel and start cranking it over and from then on you would never hear a cough out of that engine. If it ever ran while he had friends aboard I was never there to see it. He would remove the spark plug, pour gasoline in it, kick the flywheel over, watch the spark, light the gasoline with a match trying to heat up the plug, etc., etc. He did everything in the book trying to get that little simple-minded two-cycle Gray to run but it never did to my knowledge when he really wanted it to. However, when he was alone in the boat it would start within a reasonable time. He really had a vocabulary and I used to stand there listening while he was telling that engine what he thought of it. I guess that was one of my earliest lessons in marine engineering.
          Incidentally, when I mentioned the little two-cycle Gray to Jim Cary he said, "four-cycle." I repeated, "two-cycle." This went on for quite some time. We were both right. A trip to the library produced an "ad" in the Pacific Motor Boat in which Gray loudly proclaimed their 4-cycle engines and rather shamefacedly, in small type, admitted they built a little 2-cycle job. However, the "ad" in the December 1906 issue was entirely different and listed, "S.V.B. Miller, Our Branch Manager in Seattle, with temporary offices at 206 Epler Building. This 1908 "ad" was all for the 2-cycle engine. The 1918 "ad" was all for the 4-cycle. I guess it took Gray ten years to find out that the launch owner's use of high compression language in Olympia in regard to the little Gray was more than somewhat justified.

          Another engine in those days, also gasoline, was a 2-cylinder, 4-cycle Clift in the old trolling boat Nelly R belonging to an elderly shrimp fisherman named Robinson who lived down at Boston Harbor. I have never seen nor heard another engine that looked or sounded like that Clift. I just loved it! When he was coming into the city float or leaving on his way back home and he had that old Clift right up in the corner the Nelly R would be doing a dignified 5.5 or 6 knots. The throws in the crankshaft in that old 4-cycle rig were 90 degrees apart and when wide open it would go pop—pop (a long delay and again) pop—pop (another delay) and that is the way it would go all the way down the Sound. Sometimes it would seem like it was a couple or three minutes between the pop—pops, but that old thing ran and was still running the last I ever heard of it. It was a lovely sound and everyone in the countryside knew when the Nelly R was underway..."

Text : Ken Ayers. The Sea Chest. Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historial Society. Volume 4, Number 2. December 1970.