SULLIVAN, Ill. (AP) - If Clyde Lambdin ever mixes the twin worlds of his gasoline life, we’ll have a sharp-looking lawnmower capable of cutting through the average yard in the wink of an eye.
On one side of the turf, he spends his days running Lambdin Mower Repair in Sullivan with his wife, Shirley, who handles parts sales. She says her husband never met a broken mower his repair skills couldn’t hack: “He likes the challenge,” she explains. “Some of the stuff that comes in is so ancient I think they should throw it away, but he likes to get it working.”
The Lambdins say most mowers would not break down as much if their owners would haul them into the shop for regular maintenance in the winter. Instead, customers wait until spring has sprung and suddenly discover their grass reduction device is kaput. But this proclivity toward mower preventive maintenance procrastination opens a cold weather window for the mower mechanic to indulge the flip side of his skills: hot rodding.
He’s been building cool cars since he was a teenage boy in mechanics class at school and even went to work as a car mechanic in his early days but burned out on it.
“As the grunt in the shop, when the mechanics got slow, I’d have to go next door and clean the cars on the lot,” he recalls. “That is a horrible job; I still hate to clean cars.”
So he embraced agriculture and worked at the former A.E. Staley Mfg. Co. in Decatur for 20 years as a production operator before noticing there was a demand for the kind of mechanic who can fix mowers. And, as the world of mower repair seldom involves having to actually wash the mowers, he launched Lambdin Mower Repair 10 years ago.
The hot rodding pastime never stopped rumbling in the background however, and his personal stable now includes a modified ’63 Ford Thunderbird and a potent and cute ’61 Nash Metropolitan done in Ford “race red” for his wife.
He clearly has a thing for quirky English cars such as the Nash, and his current project is 1961 Morris Minor for which a radical makeover will include a hot engine transplant.
Ask very nicely and cross his palm with enough of the green you don’t get from grass cuttings, and he might be persuaded to build a hot rod for you, too. In perhaps the ultimate compliment to his skills, Mike Walker of the Street Rods Only business in Macon has commissioned Lambdin to build him a hot rod pickup truck.
Walker, who has built cars that have sold for $250,000, doesn’t have too much time to indulge in chariots for himself. But when he visited a car show and saw the cutting-edge job the mower man had done on transplanting a modern V8 engine in his own ’63 T-bird, he was impressed.
“He looked under the hood and said, ’You put that in there?’ and I said, ’Yeah, sure did,’ Lambdin says. “And then he says, ’You want to do another one?’ “
The result is a modern V8 from a Lincoln now shoehorned into the frame of a ’63 Ford F-100 pickup. Lambdin’s effort was to execute the motor and transmission transplant and also equip the truck with the posh electronic dashboard and seats from the donor Lincoln, taking care of mucho welding and wiring on the way.
Many tangled technical aspects of the project have fully indulged Lambdin’s love of challenge, but he always cut through to success. One of his secrets, he says, is working on stuff, even when he is asleep. “Sometimes, I will spend all night working on it in my head,” he explains. “And then in a dream, I will get the answer.”
It’s taken him 18 months to get the 51-year-old pickup close to the finish line, but he’s now on course to have it all wrapped up before the kaput mower brigade descends on him en masse.
It will then be up to Walker to handle the interior upholstery, exterior paint and various other finishing tasks. He will also be expected to wash the truck himself.
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Source: (Decatur) Herald and Review, https://bit.ly/1jxfowg
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Information from: Herald & Review, https://www.herald-review.com
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