A freind at work made a similar rig - mounted on a mower deck, I think, that he takes on Scouting camp-outs.
On 6/29/06, Dan Weeks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
WHen I was a lad, my best friend and I wanted to light the pond near his house so we could have night skating parties. We took an old wooden wheelbarrow frame, decked it over with bits and ends of leftover oak T&G flooring, bolted an ancient B&S 1-hp, horizontal-shaft reel mower engine to it, the kind you had to wind the starter cord manually every time you pulled it, along with an old 6v automotive generator we found lying around. Wired it up to charge a 6v car battery, also mounted to the contraption, thence to a couple of 6v headlamps, which we mounted in tree branches on opposite sides of the small pond. We'd wheel the thing out there through the snow, park it behind a big snowbank for noise attenuation, start the motor, adjust the throttle to center the needle of ammeter we'd also scrounged from somewhere when both lights were on, and would skate with a passel of youth till the wee hours with light glinting off skate blades and pond ice, and the bare limbs of trees casting scrim-like shadows over all. It was magical. And the barely audible putt-putt-putt of the engine, throttled down just about as low as it would idle, somehow added to the low-tech wonder of it all. I bet there wasn't a post-WWII piece of hardware involved in the whole setup. This was in the early seventies. We were surprised at how little power and speed the generator required to keep up with the headlamps. It served us well for several seasons until we grew up and left it behind. Dan -- Dan Weeks Freelance Writing and Photography 515/279-4825 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- OK Don, KD5NRO Norman, OK "The Americans will always do the right thing... after they've exhausted all the alternatives." Sir Winston Churchill '90 300D, '87 300SDL, '81 240D, '78 450SLC, '97 Ply Grand Voyager
