Two trades, one standard.
Tom has sailed as a marine engineer with the MEBA, the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association, for twenty years, and has been a chief engineer since 2015. That work has taken him to ports across Europe, Japan, China, Korea, Africa, South America, Central America and the Middle East. The work is what you’d expect: redundant systems, no room for guessing, and engines big enough that a wrong torque spec doesn’t just cost you a day. It strands a ship.
In April 2009 he was third engineer on the Liberty Sun, a US-flag ship carrying food aid to East Africa, when Somali pirates attacked it with rockets and automatic weapons. The crew barricaded themselves in the engine room. A rocket punched through a bulkhead. Nobody was hurt, and the ship made port with a Navy escort.
Off the water, he has built high-horsepower hot rods his whole life. Builds like that take an engineer to keep running, not just to put together.
The performance aftermarket runs wide and deep for V8s and big-cube engines. Walk down to the small engines in karts, minibikes and cycle karts and the shelf goes empty. The big brands don’t build for the small end of the curve, so what is left is mostly generic electronics with a logo on them.
“It works, it doesn’t break, and the math is right.”
Steamer Power is the opposite of generic. Every product is built to the standard Tom holds his engine room to. The first, the Steamer Power Guardian™, is a rev limiter you set from your phone, so a governor-deleted engine stops climbing at the number you pick.