I have a Malibu 21VLX for water sports and a duck boat for hunting.

FAQs Archive - Johnson Propeller Company Inc.

Q: What other hobbies interest you?

We go to Kentucky to hunt deer. Golf would be the other hobby. My son played at Middle Tennessee State and was the Conference USA Freshman of the year.

Q: Do you see yourself branching outside tow-sports boats?

We stay in our lane. If I start branching out, I don’t want it to hurt our primary business. I want to get across how unique our situation is relative to the rest of the industry, especially the propeller guys. We have experience from outboards to sterndrives to V-drives over a span of 80 years. The base that I got from Oscar Johnson to build what we do today was so far ahead of its time. There are still people copying us. We’ve gone through the gamut of what this industry has been, and I don’t think anybody else can say that.

Q: Are the tariffs on aluminum and steel affecting Johnson Propeller?

We haven’t had a direct impact on our raw materials. We don’t use a lot of steel or aluminum. We haven’t seen a lot of fluctuation in Ni-Bral raw material costs. I see a lot more issues for the industry as a whole when you look at the pontoons and other boats built of aluminum.

Q: Did you have to cut employees? How difficult was that?

It was really difficult. I tried to deal with it as best we could by cutting hours, and it was hard for these guys to work a 28-hour week. It took 4 or 5 years to get back to 40-hour weeks.

Q: Johnson Propeller has been around for decades. How did it overcome the economic crises, especially the Great Recession?

We have weathered a lot of storms since 1936. I can recall a bunch of them in the 1970s, and when I came to work in 1989, there were only four of us at the company. The years 2008 and 2009 were hard because prior to that we were doing so well. Boats were flying out the door, and then it just stopped. As a small company, we could contain our costs. We weren’t in excessive debt, and we were able to ride it out by doing what we do and doing it more efficiently.

Q: Do you ski, board, surf or all of the above?

I try to get a slalom set in a couple times a year. I’m still working on the surf part of it. The kids enjoy surfing.

Q: Most water-sports boats are equipped with props made from nickel bronze alloy. Why not use stainless like a performance prop?

We made stainless props many years ago, but we found the minor gains in performance — maybe a mile per hour faster on the top end — didn’t outweigh the potential issues in the event of a prop strike with stainless compared to nickel bronze. The Ni-Bral props are more forgiving, but that doesn’t mean they’re folding up. They absorb the impact better than a stainless prop.