| Visitors to San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf are likely to notice
a small fleet of colorful "Monterey Clipper" fishing boats. But visitors
in the 1930's would have seen scores of these boats in the same area, and
most would have been rigged for catching dungeness crab, and not so much
for catching the tourists' eyes. |
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| The commonest form of these boats had a small cabin that
was open to the back, and when you looked inside, you'd usually see a Hicks
marine gas engine- a "one lunger", a make'n'break engine that was known
for its "potato-potato-potato" exhaust note. |
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| Jame L. Hicks was an Irish immigrant who found a home in The City in
1860. He was a machinist who moved into the sewing machine business, and
who started dabbling with gasoline engines as early as 1896. By 1907 he
was advertising his own marine gas engine, naturally called a "Hicks".
The engine found success in the small boats of the mostly Italian immigrant
fishing community. Photos here show a portion of the fleet at Fisherman's
Wharf in 1936, and the fleet being "escorted" to the fishing grounds by
the USCG during WW2. The escort was deemed necessary as the Italians weren't
trusted by the government... and that's a whole other story... |
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| By 1918, at age 86, Hicks was finally able to sell his company and
retire. The new owner, the Yuba manufacturing company, eventually moved
production from San Francisco to their giant facility in Benicia, CA. Yuba
made design changes over the years, but most of the engines looked like
the one shown here, which also matches the 1926 engine which can be seen
today on the Hyde Street Pier (part of the San Francisco Maritime Historic
National Park). |
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| Yuba ended production of the engine in the 1940's during the war...
probably due in part to depressed demand, and surely in part to the engine's
obsolescence. The engine was a beast, weighing as much as 1700 pounds and
making only 8HP. Lubrication was "total loss"- everything that got oiled
merely dripped its oil into the sump. There's no telling how much of this
oil was "recycled"! Speed was controlled not by a throttle, but by a lever
that lifted the intake rocker arm. Spark timing was manually adjusted too,
using a lever which affected the timing of the spark tripper rod on the
right side of the engine. A significant upgrade was to add a generator,
which merely rested its friction drive wheel on the flywheel rim. And kicking
the flywheel over was the only way to start the engine. The engine also
has an integral reverse gear set... forward/neutral/reverse are selected
by the tall hand lever. |
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| Yuba's Hicks drawings have been lost to time. But a subcontractor who
made parts for Yuba had a full set of drawings in his machine shop, and
these were donated to the SF Maritime in the 90's. The drawings are blue
prints, blue lines, and diazos made in the 20's and 30's, and bear all
the evidence of being well-used on the machine shop floor. I was able to
get usable cell phone photos of every print I needed to reproduce the engine
as a 1:8 scale animated model. |
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The parts were all modeled in CAD and modified as needed for model
usage. 3D printing was used to make most of the parts, including the working
gears the brass fittings. The brass parts were actually printed as waxes
to be used in the "lost-wax" casting process. The largest such casting
is the authentic Hicks-pattern "weed cutter" propeller. Other parts were
photoetched, and additional parts were machined the old fashioned way. |
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| The model engine is driven by electric motor and chain from inside
the display base; a self-made sound board plays an actual Hicks recording.
It can be seen (and heard) in action by clicking the YouTube link on the
right.
1:8 scale was chosen as it is a popular scale for Monterey Clipper R/C
model boats. Any model of an early Monterey MUST have a visible Hicks engine,
so I'm happy to help! |
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