I worked with a guy once, Otto was his name, back in the
‘70s when I was an apprentice machinist at the logging yarder manufacturer on
Harbor Island. He ran the Bridgeport
section and the screw machines, making all the pins and small rollers on an old
mechanical forerunner to today’s CNC lathes, his hands constantly bathed in
cutting oil that flooded the tooling as the machine ran.
He told me about how he worked at Paccar after the war for
17 years, and how, for all of those 17 years he ran the same horizontal boring
mill every day on day shift, and how for all of those years he made the same
part, a winch housing for an Army tank, over and over again. He said, “Every night when I go to sleep I
close my eyes, and I can see every hole in that casting, its size and
tolerance, and the distance between it and all the other holes on the
part. I can literally run that part in
my sleep, and I will carry that with me into my grave.”
He had been stationed at Pearl Harbor during the war, where
he worked in a chrome shop, which brings me to the heart of the story. Somewhere along the way he picked up an old
military 45 Harley Davidson and, over the course of a whole year, he chromed
every single part on that bike.
“I used to keep it under a tarp on the beach,” he
said. “The shop was near the water, and
the barracks was over on the other side, so nobody went there much. I worked the night shift, so I started out by
tearing that bike down right there on the beach, everything, down to the motor,
where I just pulled the covers off both sides and the cylinders and heads off
the top. I did pull every nut and bolt and
stud off and chromed them, too. I
started with the frame, then the front end, the wheels, every spoke. It was really something.”
“So what happened to it?” I asked. “Ah, well, my time came up, and I was ready
to get out of there by then, so I sold it to another grunt, and then I came
home. That would have been about 1946 or
so. I imagine it’s still there,
somewhere. I think he gave me $100 for it.”
I imagine it’s still there, somewhere… sounds like a quest
to me! Next time I get to Oahu, I’m
gonna start poking around, finding old timers to talk to. “You ever hear about an old flathead 45 with
chrome everything floating around?” You
can drive every road on the island in a day if you push it. It’s gotta still be there somewhere, right?
And if I find the person who owns it now, have I got a
story for them! :-{)}
