After working for 22 years as a machinist for Westinghouse Corp. in Kearny, NJ, Sam Connelly retired to a small town in upstate New York. He spends his days helping his brother, Earl, run a small prototyping/tooling shop a few hours each day and then goes off to fish endless miles of lakes.  

 

Pursuing large mouth bass and other game fish brings Sam into narrow, shallow waterways with submerged logs and other hazards that damaged his boat’s propeller sometimes beyond repair. Sam found himself replacing them more and more frequently which became expensive.  

 

After working in a tooling shop for the last 12 years, Sam was in the habit of thinking 3-dimensionally when it came to solving problems. Earl taught him basic mold making and casting years earlier and Sam decided to try to reproduce his last remaining propeller by making a mold.

 

Sam and Earl were in the middle of a prototyping job for a customer and had enough spare Mold Max® silicone to make a mold for casting Smooth-Cast® 385 castable urethane resin to make a casting.

 

Sam says that, “making a mold of the spare prop was easy and, as it turns out, a good idea. After casting a couple, I put one on my outboard (motor) with no expectations that it would work. I don’t get the same torque from the plastic prop that I get from a metal prop, but that just means the boat goes a little slower. They last longer than I thought they would and replacing a plastic prop is a whole lot cheaper.”