Take that neighbor-kid!
One Christmas season in the early 1960s, I was visiting with the across-the-road neighbor kid, and he showed me his new Marx 28" 155mm howitzer.
It was magnificient...huge, and it fired projectiles!
He demo-fired it a couple of times for me; then, when my natural impulse figured that it was my turn...but he made it clear that the only one who could shoot it was him; all I got to do was watch.
I remember thinking that he was a pretty selfish kid.
Recently, I was scrolling through ebay, looking for lost childhood treasures, when I saw this beauty. It was listed as non-operational, but I've found with other Marx mechanisms, it might be reparable.
It arrived yesterday, as magnificent as I remember. It was pretty grimy, but intact, it even came with one of the two projectiles.
The first thing that I did was to soak it down in WD-40. After it sat for a while I took foaming detergent and a brush to it and got all of the dirt and crud out of all the nooks and crannies. Rinsed and air-dried, it looked great.
Then, with machine-oil and persistance, I got the jammed mechanism to move more; at first it was balky, but the more I worked at it, the more smoothly it moved, until it was nearly as slick and smoothly operating as new. I cocked it, pulled the lanyard, and the projectile flew about twenty-five feet. Victory!
If you ever swing by my house, unlike my long-ago neighbor kid, I'll let you shoot it as much as you like, and well have sandwhiches for lunch.
Soldier on!
Mannie
1 comment:
Can I suggest repeating the WD40? Now you've freed it up, there'll be a lot of lose crud down the barrel? Beast of a shell, by the way, does it have a rubber tip?
H
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