"A cat in a cyclotron"

[beige_alert]

In the book The Backyard Lumberjack (by Frank Philbrick and Stephen Philbrick) there is a section on lumberjack competitions. It includes this wonderful bit:

Chain saws are powerful and loud to begin with, but competitors in the hot saw competition have clearly decided that their chain saws need to be much bigger and produce a noise somewhere between the Rolling Stones being electrocuted in a Quonset hut and a cat in a cyclotron.

These people run fuels like methanol-nitromethane, which is ideal for people who really, really want maximum power and don't mind doing a major engine overhaul after every few minutes of operation. "I was warned that the stuff was incredibly flammable and unstable by a guy pouring the fuel back out of the saw, which had a dangerously hot muffler. I asked why it had to come back out, and why some of the fuel was leaking rapidly out of the saw..."

"We run mainly this methanol he-urr, ahnd it c'rodes thuh enjuhn to let it set in there. We hata put the gas back in and run it fer a minute t'clean her owt. Reason it's pourin' owt is I drilled a buncha howles ta let in mower ayer."

These fellas were from the Canadian border of Vermont and loggers by trade. Their accents were so thick, and endearing, and hysterical that I forgot that a man was telling me of a strategy wherein he intentionally drilled holes through the top of his gas tank. One might call it devotion.

He also mentions, "Though I personally witnessed only four hot saw competitions, I saw two accidents."

There is, I understand, a women here in Wisconsin who is both a strong competitor in the hot saw competitions and a grandmother.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

This isn't quite in the same territory but my dad went to CalTech back in the days where you could pay off your college tuition by mowing lawns. However, CalTech meant a *lot* of lawns, so he took his powered reel lawnmower and started modifying it: ran it on a mix of ether and toluene, increased the compression ratio by adding material to the combustion chamber, played with the spark timing... when he got done, the mower ran at 11 mph and he could do about 3x as many lawns per unit time as when he started.