Pretty cool training. I ran a few 555s back in 75 and 76. I liked em.
Unfortunately, most of em were coupled to an Alison slushbox.(640) The
392 Frods got the 540 or a 5 speed transmission.
Dan Penoff via Mercedes <mailto:[email protected]>
November 22, 2016 at 3:44 PM
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.
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