LEARNING THE ROPES

Dana Kehoe has accomplished a great deal with gasoline engines in his young life. “I began working with engines when I was about 6 years old,” says the 20-year-old student attending the University of Northwestern Ohio (UNOH). “Mostly I’d help my dad, John Kehoe, with his 800hp 1970 Chevy Nova race car, rebuilding it after races. My family has always been into engines, so I’ve been around it for a long time,” Dana says. “Those vivid memories are what motivated me to go to UNOH.” Dana is earning his Associate of Applied Science degree in Automotive/High Performance Technology.

At Christmas when Dana was 14 his family members began talking about gas engines. “They’re all part of the Thresherman’s club at Edgerton, Wisconsin,” Dana says, “and we got on the subject because my cousin was restoring a Fairbanks air-compressor for a large Y-type engine. So I asked my uncle, Jim Faith, how I could find an engine and get started on restoring it. He told me to come by his shop the next weekend and we would figure things out.”

Figuring it out meant a circa-1923 John Deere E 1-½hp gas engine for Dana to work on, and in seventh grade he reworked his first