fxfymn

Mike, Sorry I missed you. Did you get the Mack extinguisher that Paul had? A pretty rough one went for $550.00 at the auction on Saturday. I paid for the early admission ticket so I bought most of my stuff Saturday night. I left about 10:00 Sunday morning. I'm thinking those warning lights must be a PA special since they were made there. I got mine working today; someone at the VFD I bought them from apparently thought they were regular warning lights and tried to hard wire them into a truck so I had some "aftermarket" items to remove. Pretty neat with the little flasher built into them. The damn batteries cost way more than the lights though.

I thought the auction items went pretty high, but I'm probably out of touch. Enjoyed chatting with Paul and numerous other collectors I have met over the years. I did score a couple of red warning lights that attach to a 7.5V Carpenter light battery. I have only seen one other like them so I'm pretty sure they are rare. Other than that the sale remains a great place to buy items from the volunteer companies that come to sell the items they are cleaning out of the fire houses. Here is a picture of the other one I saw on Scott Siefert's (extremely nice) B Model.

Condition, not age usually dictates the replacement schedule. As others said, there are no hard fast rules that require replacement of older rigs. In our organization it was usually a combination of age and maintenance costs as measured by the "per mile to operate" cost, as well as the overall reliability of the rig; i.e. how often was it out of service for repair, did it fail to start for a call, did it break down on the road, etc. But, we were a large well funded urban department that regularly put high mileage on the rigs. One other factor that comes into play is the ISO rating given the department that sets the local property insurance rates. The ISO will down grade the department if the apparatus is too old for the rating schedule. To many small rural departments the "new" pumper they procure will already be 20 or 25 years old. It does the job and it is what they can afford.

The learning part is easy; it's the remembering part that gets harder as the years go by.

Fire trucks use a different model designations than OTR trucks. B75=500 GPM; B85=750 GPM; B95=1000 GPM along with a few odd balls like B-21 which is a Hall-Scott motor and a 1250 pump.

I was kind of skeptical, but he is insistents it has a "swedish engine". I have not seen the truck yet, but I'm going to try to get the chassis number from him. I'll find the picture he sent me and post it here.

We had a loaded concrete mixer take the plunge through a 12K rated bridge to the bottom of the creek; about a forty foot fall. The driver wasn't hurt too badly, but it was a royal PIA to tote him up out of there. The general comment by everyone on the scene was that loaded trucks had been crossing that bridge for years. So, even though you might make it once, every crossing is still a roll of the dice.

Mine is a TR-6610. Anyone know the difference between the 6610 and the 6710?

Thanks; I'll have to check my build sheets. The IH is coming along, but it's really starting to drag out. Probably time to put it aside for awhile. I'll post some pics pretty soon.

Fifth over or direct?

A friend recently purchased a CF fire truck with a Pierce body that was one of the last CF cabs made by Mack. He tells me that it is equipped with a Scania engine. I had no idea that Mack ever used Scania engines in the CF chassis. Is this a "one off" or are there others out there?

I needed a bearing for my transfer case and the cheapest I could find was (gulp) $2200.00. After further checking I found it at a much more reasonable price of $200.00, but the rep from Timken told me that I might have to wait quite awhile because even though Timken showed the bearing as avaialble it was a low order item. He explained that they would do a production run at some point, but only when the part was totally out of inventory, and it could be several months or more after that. It turned out they located the part overseas and had it shipped to me. So, the bottom line is even though the part may be hard to locate, it is probably still going to be produced. One other surprising place I have found hard to find parts is Amazon.

Are you interested in fire apparatus? If so, how do you want the pictures?

The PN (model) is cast into the side of the tranny. I'm not sure if the transmission from a 707 will fit my ENF510.

Is the A-Car from Northeast Construction(?), Framingham, MA?

And he will be at the Spring Melt and Macungie. He always has those with him.

What is the PN of the transmission?

Looks great! I always feel like doing all that work to the chassis is like wearing new underwear; hardly anyboby will notice, but the folks you really care about will be impressed.

Don't know how much cost factors in, but you might want to check out this site: http://magnetpaints.com/default.asp I have used their one stage paint and I'm happy with it.

I'll be there both days and giving the UHFS the extra $$ to get into the flea market early. Randy; Haven't made dinner plans yet, but I gave up getting anything but a hydraulic sandwich at the titty bars a long time ago. Paul: Charlie is reluctant at best; He was at the house today working on his newest truck, a 56 Ford F-350; ex FOMOCO plant protection truck from their Nashville glass plant. He is doing a total re-build and it is wearing on him a bit.

Made my hotel reservations yesterday. I'll stop by and I may talk an old friend of yours, Charlie Bacchini, into coming with me.

Let us know what you come up with. You also might try PM'ing Firemack; I vaguely remember that he had new plates made for the B model they re-did.

Unless you need a non-standard size or lettering these are pretty commonly available at the flea markets. If you need to re-hab what you have you can do so by cleaning them, paint them black, and then place a sheet of fine sand paper on a piece of plate glass; gently rub the name tag on the paper until the paint is removed from the letters.

Just showed up on the SPAAMFAA web site. Asking $35K or best serious offer.

I'll never forget watching a job somewhere near the BPl where the driver of one of the L models could not keep it running when he put it in pump gear. He would put it in gear, get out of the cab to throttle up and the engine would die. Get back in the cab, take it out of pump gear, re-start, put back in pump gear, rev the hell out of it, jump out, engine dies, repeat about ten more times until someone came by to throttle it up while he sat in the cab. I am really surprised that even one survived to be re-built for display.