It rolled off the assembly line in 1965. It’s been rolling along ever since.
It probably rolled across golf courses for
some years, but for the last thirty-plus years, it hasn’t been too close to a
golf course.
“Uncle” bought the old Cushman many years ago to serve as a yard cart for the motel-RV Park. The work for the cart wasn’t abusive. But there wasn’t anyplace to keep the cart inside. Local juveniles found they could easily hijack the old girl and take her on a joy ride.
Uncle would have to go out and find the
cart, where the batteries had run down, or in at least one case, pull it out of
a ravine where the miscreants left it for dead.
Removing the keys was no help. The thieves knew to hotwire across the switch. Chaining and locking the thing to a light pole slowed things down.
When “Auntie” and Uncle retired from
the hospitality industry, Uncle sold the cart to Mom. She wanted it serve as a carrier between the
garden and the house. Mom and I rented a
small U-Haul trailer from La Junta and took her S-15 GMC to get the cart.
The trailer opening wasn’t quite wide
enough for the back tires on the old golf cart, but Uncle took care of that by
taking a full-speed run up the trailer ramp.
The cart went in.
The days of being garaged outdoors were
over when Mom got it. The old cart had a permanent place in the garage. One car had to be parked at a slight angle to
make room for everything, but it worked.
It’s still working.
The poor old thing has suffered some
abuse in its present situation. This time,
from grandkids and even great grandkids, who also found thrills in joy-riding
around the farm. It has lost both
bumpers, lost a few screws and bolts, and suffered cracks to its
aging fiberglass body. But it still
runs.
Maintenance was highly necessary this
spring. I knew it would have to
have new batteries. When I folded back the body to reveal
batteries, I discovered a broken tube that serves as the frame for the machine.
I can fix that. I took one piece of angle iron that would fit
inside the square tube, and another piece that would fit over the tube. It took some doing, but eventually I got
everything lined up and clamped in place.
I “rivet” welded the two angle
irons. That means I did what I usually
do when welding—burned a hole through outside angle iron, the tube and even the
inside angle iron. Once the hole is through
everything, I backed the rod out and attempted to patch the hole—also standard
practice for my welding.
So far, it is working. The angle irons can’t move and they keep the tube
in place. That job done, I turned to
replacing the speed switch plates. There
are four copper plates about an inch by two inches. They are stationary. A “movable switch plate” rotates with the
foot pedal to vary the speed of the cart by contacting the stationary
plates.
The old plates were burned and rough and
the moveable plate couldn’t return to its resting place, so the thing was
always in gear. I had either to shut off
the switch or grab the foot-feed and pull up to disengage the contact plates
and stop the cart.
A thorough cleaning and new batteries and
I was ready to go. Except: after an initial lurch, the thing wouldn’t
go. It was dead. New batteries, cleaned
cables and contacts and nothing. When I
hooked it up to the charger, it wouldn’t charge.
To make a long story short, I spent a lot
of hours when I wasn’t working on something else, while waiting for it to maybe
rain, trying to figure out why that thing wouldn’t run. I used an electric meter to test this lead
and that lead. I changed the solenoid. Nothing.
Finally, I traced the problem to one
particular cable. It would carry current
when I tested it with the meter, but when it was under any kind of load,
including charging, it finked out. I had
cleaned the terminal when I replaced the batteries, but the problem was corrosion
where cable and terminal meet, the clamp that hold the cable wires and the
terminal together.
I used the most sophisticated of tools to
figure it out—a pair of pliers. Thinking
maybe one of the new batteries was no good, I made brief contact across the
negative and positive battery posts. It
would spark if I went directly from battery post to battery post. But when I shorted from cable to cable,
nothing.
It was a week or two of either walking
or driving a pickup when I had to carry stuff around the yard, from shop to
machine. Redoing the cable connection
took no time at all in comparison to the amount of time I spent scratching my
head.
You will have trouble imagining the thrill I felt when I first
pressed the foot pedal and the old gal jumped to life.
So, the old Cushman golf cart rolls on. It lives to serve another day.
