The Motor Wheel & Fiyer

After reading this article it may sound like I have abandoned my hit &. miss engines, but this is not the case. I'd like to end my story on a subject 'Ye Olde Reflector' keeps reminding us of, and that is safety around our engines.

My father was a farmer all his life. In 1923, when he was 33 years of age, he had a Columbus 10 HP hit & miss engine they used for sawing wood and various other farm chores. They were sawing wood with this engine one day, when he got a sleeve of his jacket caught in the pulley of the engine. This was three years before I was born. This almost completely severed his hand from his wrist, but somehow they did save his hand and got the two to grow back together as one, leaving him no flexibility whatever in his fingers or wrist, for the rest of his life. He lived to be 83.

Some years later, my father had another unfortunate accident with this same engine. He and one of my brothers were lining up the engine to cut fodder when an iron bar he was using under one of the wheels slipped off and broke his leg.

The last time I saw the old Columbus was shortly before World War II on a flat bed truck on its way to a scrap yard. I think my father got seventeen dollars for this engine as scrap.