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Joe Stephan – Ace Mechanic Copyright © 2000 by Joe Stephan “DeLong!” Joe quickly repeated. “DeLong. He finally went in there. ‘Joe,’ Red says to me, ‘Go ahead. Try it. You’ll be all right.’ I said no way! I wasn’t going to get in there.” Doc and Doug began laughing with Joe at his refusal to get into the sidecar. “It had a rope in there to pull yourself in. Well I had pretty good… I was a pretty good size shoe on too.” I found this last statement to be especially interesting. At the time, there must have been some good-natured ribbing going on about who would have enough nerve to go into the sidecar let alone who could actually fit into it! When interviewed in Motorcycling and Bicycling Illustrated afterwards about how he came to be the one who volunteered, he said that he had ‘number seven shoes.’ Even then, he had to remove his shoes to fit inside. This interview was conducted on the heels of the first attempt. Canned Heat “Do you remember—now when they were tinkering with it before hand, they probably changed spark plugs, for the run, they probably put new plugs in—huh? Did they? Start it up on one set; warmed it up. Red said they put canned heat under it to warm up the engine. It was a cold day. Did that hold out?” Doc paused, waiting for Joe to reply. Joe just looked at him blankly. “You don’t remember? Red said that they put heat under there?” Joe didn’t seem to remember this. Especially since he was probably only there for the first record run and not the second when the heat was used. “They put heat under there to warm it up.” Doc repeated. “No,” he finally replied. “That I didn’t see because I was right there, I didn’t see it. There was such a crowd around there. They had the police around there, all over the…” Joe was trying to relay the sense of commotion and confusion that must have existed at the time. Photos taken at the time of the first attempt show a lot of people posing behind Red and the XP-4 machine. “The reason I’m talking about this is…” Doc pressed on, cutting Joe off. “…I have—see, that’s the right…that’s the Scintilla magneto. They used a Swiss magneto.” Joe nodded in agreement and Doc went on. “And boy oh boy—if that gets just a little damp, now like this morning—it’s done! It’s finished! You don’t get anything out of it.” Joe continued nodding and voicing his agreement with Doc. “I have to put a heat lamp—it sits outside or anything—I have to put a heat lamp on that and cook it awhile before it dries out enough. It is the most sensitive magneto that I’ve ever take… I wanted to know if there’s any truth… Do you remember anything like that? Of course, did they drive it…they didn’t drive it up from the factory—to Roosevelt Boulevard, did they?” “No. It was sent up there with a truck. It was all in back. And DeLong had the job of doing that. He was the one that was also assistant to Mr. Henderson.” Joe may have meant Art Lemon. It’s not clear when Everett DeLong first came to work at Ace, whether before or after Lemon’s arrival. “DeLong was also Mr. Henderson’s…second man, you can say.” XP-4 Pistons “Now, another thing,” Doc went on to say, indicating XP-4. “The pistons in this…have real high domes and have one ring.” “One ring?” Joe asked in confirmation. “One ring.” Doc repeated. “Well, the ones that we put in there were the larger pistons. The first pistons were cast iron and then we went down into aluminum pistons. But not with the dome on them like you say.” Joe was speaking about production bikes now and not the experimental engines. “They were just flat.” Doc offered. 05/22/00 Preliminary Draft Page 18 of 43
Joe Stephan – Ace Mechanic Copyright © 2000 by Joe Stephan “Flat. Yeah.” Joe agreed and then went on. “And, ah, floating pins with a bronze plug in the end of each one. Every one of them…afterwards we were even fixing the motor up that came in there from other places—that were sent in to be fixed. Then when I finally got into the service department I was doing some of that work with the connecting rods and putting the new pistons on there with the floating pins in it. They were all noisy when they first started up but boy, afterwards they went so smooth.” “Yeah, aluminum pistons were that way.” Doc agreed but they were now off of the subject of the XP-4 in particular. “The pistons are drilled all full of holes then on this…to lighten them.” “We didn’t do that on the standard jobs. When somebody sent one in we fixed it up.” Joe didn’t seem to have specific knowledge of the internal components used in the experimental engine. XP-4 Magneto “I’ve had an awful lot of trouble with this magneto—just a heavy dew and this thing won’t go. I have to put a heat lamp on it and cook the magneto. Very sensitive.” Doc was trying to steer the conversation back to the XP-4 and the record run. “You should put the right magneto on that they had on there.” Joe said this, as if the XP-4 were just another street Ace. “It was a…” “A Simms.” Doc filled in the name of the standard magneto for Joe. “The street bikes had Simms on them.” “It’ll run just as good as with that magneto on there.” Joe was referring to the Scintilla magneto currently used on the experimental engine. “For what I do with it, I think it would run better.” Doc had to admit. “This magneto is a pain in the foot! But Red said it used a Scintilla magneto, so I put…” Red’s Close Call at Factory “Well they did everything special on that.” Joe indicated the experimental machine in passing. “Because, Art Lemon…you know, when he first came there I told him—I even told Mr. Henderson—I said, ‘I have a little 61 Harley with a sidecar and I can beat a solo Ace.’ He asked me—Mr. Henderson now.” He probably meant Art Lemon. Apparently he had complained to Mr. Henderson about the Ace’s lack of power in the past. “Because I worked with the fellow that tested the motorcycles [Joe Dixon] before they got shipped away, I worked there with him to get the machines ready for him to test. He [Art Lemon] came over there and he said, ‘Do you do all that to the motorcycle before the tester runs them?’ I said yes, I make sure that the clutch is adjusted right, the brakes are right—to see if there is a cotter pin in it because we had one cotter pin failure over there. “Red was…the second week he was there—when Art Lemon took over. When he was there I told him we had fellows up at the motorcycle club that are running us down about the Ace not being so fast; they’re too slow. “Art Lemon was there two weeks—his first two weeks—this is on a Saturday. He says to me, ‘Jehovah, don’t go home. We’re going to try something after the gang gets out of here.’ We had that track in there, in the factory there. I said, ‘All right. I’ll stay.’ “Whatever Art Lemon did to that motor—Red was testing it. They had a young fellow in the experimental room—a little bit—about the same age as I was, and he worked in there. Don’t you know he forgot to put cotter pins in the [unclear]—in the brakes you know? Red didn’t know it. “He was over there riding it on the track, riding the heck out of it. All of the sudden, I see, he put out his oars. He couldn’t stop! Heading for the pit! Because the railroad had an entry in the factory there and they used to back in the…they used to load that up with the cycles and send them out…and there was a plank across there and a big fat wall on the other side. 05/22/00 Preliminary Draft Page 19 of 43
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