Sounds like a guy to bring along to the zombie apocalypse
--FT
On 11/22/16 4:44 PM, Dan Penoff via Mercedes wrote:
The guy I worked for was big in the pipeline and tank building industry. He
made his money by designing and patenting a system called a “Collins
PowerPack”. He was a customer of my Dad’s who was the one that financed his
stuff and managed the leasing to the end users.
They were really pretty cool:
A Cummins “Triple Nickle” (555) V-8 with modified heads that made half of the
engine an air compressor, coupled to a Marathon alternator (generator to you
guys), and usually eight Miller 400 amp “buzz boxes” in a rack on one end.
The whole thing was skid mounted with a lifting eye and a base (fuel) tank in
the skid.
The idea was that tank builders and pipeline fabricators could drag these
things into the field where there wasn’t any power or other resources and have
electricity, compressed air, and welders. He made a bunch of these for people
like Panhandle Eastern and a number of foreign companies. Our shop was next to
a rail spur, where many of them were loaded onto rail cars to their final
destination.
He had some sort of arrangement with Chicago Bridge & Iron to buy welders from
them. About every six weeks a flatbed semi loaded to the gills with Miller 400 amp
buzz boxes and loads of the old Lincoln “sausages” would show up and offload them
into the back building in our shop. My job was to check them out, bang the worst
of the dings out of the covers, repair/replace whatever they needed, then paint the
MIllers the standard dark blue. We did enough of these things that we even had a
stack of new faceplates for the ones that were really dinged up. The Lincolns got
fired up, checked to see if they would produce current and weld, if not, the fields
got flashed, check them again and move them to the “finished” pile. I don’t ever
recall having to repair a Lincoln other than flashing the fields on ones that had
sat for a long time or possibly replacing a broken or open field rheostat.
Most of these he sold on the secondary market. The best of the Millers went
into the powerpacks.
On Nov 22, 2016, at 2:03 PM, Curley McLain via Mercedes <[email protected]>
wrote:
Yep, a 1500 lb sausage. and, yes, replace the brushes and they will run another 40 years. I was
sad when I saw Ag Mech was getting rid of them. I guess the powers that be said they needed
"up to date" equipment. Same thing happened in the Industrial Technology metals lab. It
had a dozen Clausing Lathes that were great, but no metric thread cutting. Someone made the
decision that the lab needed "up to date" lathes. So they got rid of the good Clausings,
and put in indian crap that was a bigger footprint, so they lost 4 lathes, and the indian crap was
continually broken down. Most of the time there were only 4 or 5 that were working, and they had a
guy working on them maybe 6-8 hours a week.
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--
--FT
Winston Churchill:
“Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or
petty,
never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.
Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the
enemy.”
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