By Kevin Bamerick, ACBS Member and Regular ACBS Rudder Contributor
E. Murray Lombard wrote entertaining epithets of boat names in the 1929 Motor Boating magazine. The “999 sounds fast,” he wrote, “999 was a super hydro.” The hydro-plane was owned by Edsel Bryant Ford of Detroit, Michigan. Resemblant to Horace Dodge’s Baby Delphine, John Hacker, in 1924, designed a similar speed hull for the Ford Motor Company automobile manufacturer.
Edsel Ford’s speedboat Nine-Ninety-Nine at the Ford Rogue plant, August 1924, From the collections of Henry Ford.
From stem to stern, the 28-foot 6-inch L racer tapered narrowly to a barrel-back transom. Edsel Ford named it Nine-Ninety-Nine after his father Henry’s 1902 oval track racer whose engine was blueprinted by the Ford mechanical engineer, C. Harold Mills, Sr. Henry named the racer for the Empire State Express, the aristocrat of steam locomotives, but the media colloquially called her the Red Devil.
The hydro’s Liberty V-12 aircraft motor was redesigned by Ford Motor engineer Harold A. Hicks to spec the volumetric 1350 ci maximum piston displacement. The Liberty crankcase, crankshaft, and connecting rods were retained as the team tested the correct size camshaft. Mechanic Alphonse ‘Al’ Esper, buoyed in the marine department, noted the motor’s “smaller bores” to historian Owen Bombard of the Benson Ford Research Center in 1951.
Shown with aluminum engine hatches, (Motor Boating archives).
The Ford Highland plant designed the Marine 12-inch pitch gears for its dry plate clutch gearbox. A new two gear, universal joint was in the line drive. This technology would be out of date in 1925 when the APBA Sweepstakes class race committee adopted the rule that boats would not have a gearbox.
Al Esper monitored the 555 hp dynamometer shop testing before a wet run at the Ford River Rogue plant. It is possible Edsel Ford test drove the Nine Ninety-Nine to 50 mph as Esper adjusted the six carburetors, custom mounted on the side of the motor. The actual race crew ensconced were Henry Ford’s chauffeur Ray Dahlinger and riding mechanic James Smith.
Aluminum hatches of pressed in louver vents sheathed the motor. Under a sleek glistening mahogany deck were “long intake ducts” to aerate the engine. Ventilation ducts under the cockpit channeled fumes to exit at a stern louver. Ford was ahead of his time for transom ventilation did not become a mandate until 1940.
Edsel ventilated even the cockpit. The Nine Ninety-Nine’s “cockpit ride was like a Lincoln limousine” – no doubt the media complimentary of Ford’s purchase of the Lincoln Motor Company. Lincoln’s centennial is celebrated in August 2022.
Lincoln ad (Motor Boating, October, 1924).
Murray’s appellation for Nine-Ninety-Nine “sounding fast” echoed across Biscayne Bay at the 1924 southern Florida regatta. The straight transom exhaust heard by Miami coppersmith William S. McCombs, who specialized in exhaust manifolds for Liberty and Curtiss OX-5 motors. The “super hydro” lettered Nine-Ninety-Nine swept the event flying the Detroit Yacht Club colors. Her APBA assigned T-99 painted silver on her freeboards as she won the McAllister silver cup trophy.
At the 1924 Detroit Gold Cup, the whistling tone of the Nine-Ninety-Nine’s distant train would reach rail speeds during the 150-mile Sweepstakes race. Dahlinger and Smith held third place behind Cigarette, Jr. and L.G. Hamersley could hear her pant. On the 17th lap, 54 miles completed, propeller wash from leader, Gar Wood’s Miss Detroit VII’s “caused Nine-Ninety-Nine’s motor to over revolution, 200 RPM higher than normal,” noted Esper. An evil cacophony heard of the engine block “throwing the crankshaft.”
Flames shot up through the hatches from the crank puncturing the gas tank. “A 90 degree turn veered the vessel” as both men leapt overboard. The next day Al Esper inspected the burnt-up wreckage grounded in “only about a foot of water.” Lost forever its remains, like its “self-aligning propeller shaft mounted in trunnions into a worm gear-controlled rudder.”