About a decade ago our club was donated a collection of steam pumps from a longtime member’s estate. Originally they were going to build a stepped rack (something like bleachers) to display them on. It never happened. Instead they were put “into storage” (ie dumped in the tree line at the bottom of the showgrounds.) Kim thought putting them on a wagon might be better than leaving them in the weeds for the scrappies to steal. Except we didn’t have one. Last year a family friend was scrapping out a bunch of stuff and I purchased a pair of axles with steel wheels from him for $35. A steering axle from a wagon type manure spreader, and a straight axle out from under a husker shredder. Except I couldn’t get them hauled until this week… meanwhile the guy who was cutting up the scrap got a little torch happy and cut away all the steering stuff from my axle. Grrrrrrrr! The guy felt bad and gave me another set of steering parts. They looked close, but weren’t quite right. I spent almost 4 hours today making them fit. I needed to lengthen the tie bar almost 4", so I got the bright idea of splicing it in the center. Then I had to graft on the part that holds the tongue since that was burnt off as well… It doesn’t look factory purty but it should be serviceable. Welding in this heat wasn’t much fun, tho. Next step is to weld mounting perches on the rear axle. After that I need to get a couple 12 foot 4x6 or perhaps 6x6 for sills. I’m planning on mounting the biggest duplex pump (about a 6x7x6) transversely directly over the rear axle, and 3 or so of the other ones ahead of it. These things are bloody HEAVY, so I may well need to build truss rods before I’m done, too. Meanwhile, one of the club directors has already begun poo-poo-ing the whole project. He says that the pumps are “junk”… So I’ll probably tear into them after they’re mounted and see if a couple can be gotten running. This may sound backwards, but they’ll be at a nice convenient height to work on once they’re on the wagon rather than fighting with them down in the dirt. I forgot to take pix of today’s progress, maybe Tuesday. Meanwhile, this is an old pic of Kim and the big Transit pump.
