Car parts in strange places

[enjenjo]

I was at the Local County Fair tonight, and was visiting some friends that are camped there. the camp site is on the back side of the midway, and one of the rides was across the street from us. We were looking at a side of the ride, not normally seen. On this particular ride, there was a drive mechanism that transmits power from a hub, to the outer end of two arms. The drive was made from four old Ford banjo rears, complete with torque tubes, set up nose to nose, with a Ford Ujoint in the middle. The power was applied through the axle on the hub end, through the ring gear to the torque tube driveshaft, to the second driveshaft, and through the ring gear to the axle on the other end. My guess this rig must be 50 or more years old, and still going strong.

[wayne petty]

when i spent a summer on lummi island in washington state.. i got invited to help out on a reef netter...  seems they used hall scott starters and bomb bay door motors off WW2 bombers  to haul the nets up...   most had chain drives to various old ford transmissions to be able to change the speed at will.. and mechanical brakes to hold the winches in place... till the salmon swam into the net.,..    they sat waiting for the fish a lot..   last i heard there are only 11 licenses left out of hundreds..

decades ago... when they first started X raying baggage.. mom bought some fresh salmon... had them cleaned on the beach... wrapped them in trash bags... threw them in her luggage and went to the sea tac airport to bring them home to los angeles for dads special fish dinner.. when the bags went through the X ray units... they could see  the fish inside...


if you have a some old Proto tools...  you are holding recycled model T axles...   they bought all they could get  to make tools with..   seems that henry made some great steel for those...

[GPster]

I don't know all the particulars but I had a '48 Ford coupe one time and the yard where I got it couldn't wait to get the rear end back. A local farm machine shop needed the pinion gear back to repair a post hole digger. The post hole digger may have been factory or something their father had put together years before. He had done amazing things for that farm comunity years before. They had something that looked like an old time manual tire changing machine with big cones on the center but it was apparently made (well) by him. He had made it during the war. He would take wooden farm wagon wheels, set them on the spindle and cut the spokes at the proper radius to drop a car wheel's rimon the cut off spokes. He would drill the rims and nail through the rim into the radiused cut off ends of the spokes. That allowed farmers to run rubber tires on their wooden wagon wheels and the wider tread kept the wheels from sinking deeply into wet ground. That machine he had built was so precise that one of his sons used it to cut the spokes on  old Ford wire wheels and weld each of the spokes into some VW rims for me. GPster

[dave boley]

Back in the late '50s and early '60s my relatives on my mother's side were into old gas and oil well leases.  They were all folks who had learned to do things with what they had durring the depression and even though things were better they followed their old ways.  They used to buy older cars that still would run and take every thing off of them but the dash a front body parts.  then they would set them up on a fixed base of some sort and take power from the rear end to drive one or more pump jacks on the old wells.  They would make their own natural gas carbs and power the engines with well head gas.  The last one I remember them using was a '53 Studebaker.