Originally Posted by
smittythewelder
I'll give this thread a bump and see if anybody gets interested.
Gene (or anybody), my little bit of knowledge is all from what I saw in Reg. 10 some 40-50 years ago, but seems like I saw a hand throttle manufactured by Quincy. Did you guys have a line of boat hardware. Nearly everybody out here used Leonard Keller's stuff, but occasionally I'd see hardware from some other source. Handles and pulleys you'd expect from any maker of hardware for the pleasure boating industry, but racing hand throttles seemed like a pretty specialized item, yet if memory serves, I saw one from Atwood, and another from (approximately) Wilcox-Crittendon, who also made a little steering wheel plus hub for cable steering.
I wish I could say more about Keller, who was an old guy (my judgment of "old" has changed somewhat since then, oh dear) when I first visited his shop on Stone Way in north Seattle. I know he'd been a racer, post-war and maybe earlier, and ran in A Hydro against such local notables as Chuck Hickling, Val Hallum, and Lin Ivey. IIRC, his old boat is still in the area and in good shape. Seems like Mark Demeray worked for Keller for a time; maybe he'll chime in here.
Keller sold the business to ______ Williams (I'm blanking on his first name, terrible because I knew and liked the man!!), a high school shop teacher in Bremerton,WA, whose boys raced (let's see, the older boy was Tom (?), who last ran Super C, and his wife was Shirley, great gal; brother, I need a program to do a de-frag on my brain!!). If Gene Laes, who used to run BSH and AOH with me and still races in the two Antique runabout classes, and who was a student in ______ William's shop classes happens to see this, maybe he'll contribute.
Eventually, the Keller-Williams business was sold to Buzz Thorsen, machinist and ex-racer in Oregon. I knew Buzz a little from when he used to show up to race BOH with a gorgeous '56 Chevy Nomad wagon, car-topping his equally gorgeous McDonald hydro with matching paint job. At a race in Oregon in 1966, everybody in the pits came over to see his new engine, the first Harrison we had seen out here. Anyway, I understand that Buzz's son Alan gradually took over the hardware biz. Where it went from there, if anywhere, I don't know, but Alan shows up here, and I think Steve Greaves knows about this (in fact, he might be getting the Keller-Williams-Thorsen hardware made currently . . . .
(EDIT) Thought of another one. There was a maker of speedometers for pleasure boats, something like Air-Guide (??); I wonder if they had some of their meters calibrated for racing speeds, because I think I saw one or two in raceboats . . . .
(EDIT) DAVE!!!! DAVE Williams!!!!! (shakes head slowly, listens to his own shrunken brain sloshing around).
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