Some engines were dropped off by friends and others he acquired himself. “It took me six months to get it running, but it did run.”Īfter restoring that engine, his collection grew quickly. “It had actually been pressed into the earth and the lower unit was the only thing sticking up,” Lincoln recalls. It started when he found a 1927 Johnson K35 buried under a pile of engines in a shop in Maine.
His antique outboard collection is one of the largest on the East Coast. He sold his Stetson & Pinkham business to Lincoln in 1975, and he’s been running it ever since. After a stint in the army and then finishing college, Lincoln was unable to find a job at one of the large outboard companies at the same time, Pinkham was thinking of retiring. He started working for Pinkham when he was 16, and a couple years later the dealer sent him to school. During the process he became well-acquainted with Irving Pinkham, a nearby Mercury dealer. “It doesn’t run as well as it looks, though.” After mounting the engine on an 8-foot MiniMax hydroplane, which he subsequently flipped and sank, Lincoln took the engine apart. “I think it’s the best-looking outboard ever made,” he says. When he was 16, he bought a Mercury Mark 20 for 60 bucks. Lincoln has been interested in outboards since he was a kid running an 8-foot pram on a lake in Maine powered by his first outboard, a Buccaneer. “Everyone and his brother was making them.” “By World War I, there was something like 52 outboard manufacturers,” he says. Shortly after Evinrude entered the market in 1907 there was a large influx of new manufacturers. Having worked on both engines, Lincoln says the first Evinrude motor represented a significant improvement over the Waterman. Waterman’s outboard always took some effort to get running. “It’s a little more than a myth, but it’s one of those stories.” Evinrude’s outboard was quite innovative for being the second on the market, Lincoln says. “It’s a pretty good bet that old man Evinrude might have worked for Cameron Waterman in the factory,” Lincoln tells me as we move on to look at the second successful outboard. After a few faulty prototypes, Waterman produced a water-cooled engine in 1907 and the product took off, with somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 released to the market. With a vision for a marine engine, Waterman started meeting with a group of engineers who helped guide the project to fruition. His outboard was actually a converted motorcycle engine. Waterman was a smart guy with an engineering degree from Yale who had access to a lot of ideas, Lincoln tells me.
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