Showing posts with label fire fighting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fire fighting. Show all posts
well, this is a surprise, I've never seen a steam pumper crashed
in better days it was the above... front wheel drive is the Christie
nearly identical to the 1913 fire engine in the Nethercutt
http://www.blackdiamondnow.net/black-diamond-now/2013/01/black-diamond-fire-truck-in-the-ditch.html
How a JOX model American LaFrance ladder truck was delivered in the 40s
The straight-frame Model JO and JOX was the industry's fist compact, cab forward service aerial. The JO/JOX established the basic configuration of American aerial ladder trucks for many years to come. This pioneering design placed the engine and driver ahead of the front axle. An extremely wide cab enveloped the entire front end of the vehicle. The compact JO/JOX was significantly shorter than a conventional six-wheel tractor-trailer aerial ladder truck. With an overall length of 40 feet, 30 inches, the JO/JOX would fit into any fire station that could house a standard city service ladder truck. Best of all there was no need for a tillerman to steer the rear end of the apparatus.
https://www.trucksplanet.com/catalog/model.php?id=1217
quite bizzare, but true, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has some cool things that were donated, but never went into its museum, and they are finally tired of storing them, so it's auction time in 5 weeks
No, they don't seem to have any one with the motivation to take a single decent photo, even with a cell phone... but they are going to get these sold to go to a good home... so, there's that.
One old steam pumper, and a real 1826 praire schooner. The Consetoga wagon was prevalent in the east for heavy hailing, but the schooner was the choice of pioneers in the west for it's light weight when winching up mountains and crossing rivers... it was nearly a boat on wheels, an they sometimes had to float.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/prairie-schooner
https://www.britannica.com/technology/Conestoga-wagon#ref23895
The pumper is an American LaFrance
http://nortonauctioneers.com/Auctions/Americana/Americana.html
Americana Auction
Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indianapolis, Indiana
Saturday, March 11, 2017 @ 10:30 a.m.
Digging a bit I find that the reason these are coming out of deep long term storage and getting sold is that the museum wants to double in size http://www.indyracingmuseum.org/news/ now that it has a new head honcho exec director who was realized the 1970s era museum that hasn't been ungraded in decades, and has 300 cars that can't get displayed because the museum is too small.
“The lighting, the technology, it’s vintage 1976,” said Betsy Smith, who is in her second year heading the nonprofit foundation that operates the museum. “We’re a racing museum, but nothing in here moves. Except the trophy.”
She nodded toward the Borg-Warner Trophy, the 5-foot tall Indy 500 winner’s trophy, which was rotating slowly on a lazy Susan. “I’d like to get some interactive technology in here and some video so that visitors could really experience racing,” she said.
Now, about 60 cars (1/5th of all their inventory) are displayed in the museum’s 30,000 square feet. The foundation owns 300 additional cars that for lack of space gather dust in the museum’s basement. “You never want to display your entire collection all at once,” Smith said, “but (with the expansion) we could display maybe 150 and rotate them more often.”
Instead of visitors simply inspecting parked cars, she wants to do a better job of telling the stories of the cars, possibly with video tablets placed around the vehicles that show the race cars actually racing or by other high-tech methods. “Like a hologram of Donald Davidson that you could ask questions to,” Smith said. Davidson is the Speedway’s encyclopedic historian who is known for having the most minute detail at his fingertips.
Visitors come from all over the world to see the Speedway’s museum, but total attendance, 127,000 last year, is 1/3rd the Indy Museum of Art and 1/10th of The Children’s Museum (about 1.2 million a year).
Doubling the size of the Speedway museum is a tall order of about $100 million, but unlike other museums, it has no endowment fund, no corporate sponsorship and until recently no members. It has relied on the Hulman-George family, which owns the track and allows the museum to stay in its building rent-free, and on gate receipts that amount to about $1 million a year.
Until now, the museum has never in its history tried to raise any money. Seriously, how does it think it's representing 100 years of innovation in racing with 60 cars? No videos, no interaction, and nothing upgraded from the 70s? Hell, I've done a better job with this blog of telling Indy 500 history!
"The spectacular items in this one-of-a-kind auction tell important stories about life in America in the days of our grandparents and great grandparents, and deserve to be displayed and used in an appropriate setting. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum was never intended to be that setting and it is time they find a home where they can be enjoyed as treasured examples of American life of 75 to 100 years ago, or more" said Betsy Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Indianapolis Motor Speedway Foundation that operates the museum.
one of the things that made the USA a cool place to be, was the firefighter team competitions... on Long Island they used to race cars as part of the championship... some far out hemi cars too, backwards Corvettes, etc. Crazy shit, I LOVE it!
Back in 1965, ABC ran a television show called Wide World of Sports. On one of their shows they had a fireman's competition between different fire departments in the country. The competition involved putting five fireman on the back of a homemade firetruck and taking off from a dead stop and hooking hoses to fire hydrants, unloading ladders, etc. It was like a quarter mile of competition to see who could do it the fastest time.
the above Dart is an altrered wheel base wrinkle wall monster, a Super Stock Hurst special?
One of the fire departments on Long Island, the Central Islip Fire Department drill team used a 1965 hemi Coronet with a truck back end welded in place where the trunk would have been.
All found on http://members.tripod.com/termites_drillteam_1/oldpics/page_3.html
http://www.1962to1965mopar.ornocar.org/ml-heininger65firetruck.html
the 1966 and 68, West Sayville Flying Dutchmen
And this competition still happens!
but to really spin your brain, they have a full photo gallery of all the cool old race cars on a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/pg/NYSDrillTeamMemories/photos/?tab=album&album_id=310852747035
Dexter, New York, has a 1st mention of a "foot team" in the dept. minutes in 1898 and participation continued into the late 1980's.
and one Facebook page is looking to connect us to all of them, there seem to be about 70 teams https://www.facebook.com/NYSFireDeptDrillTeams/
3 years ago Hemmings ran an article on one of these race cars, and called it a Fire Chiefs car.
The object is, a team of competitors board a customized vehicle that looks sort of like a fire truck. They line up at a starting line against another team and, on signal, race for 475 feet. The rigs halt, they dismount, and hook a hose to a hydrant before hitting a target with the water stream. Or, throw a ladder against a platform and scramble to the top.
So on one level, it's a car race. Today's hottest "trucks" are often based on tubular steel chassis originally designed for drag racing or paved-oval Modifieds. One team famously used to use a mid-1960s Corvette body turned around backwards, with the fastback rear window serving as a driver's windshield and the engine bay, less hood, as a hose bed.
So on one level, it's a car race. Today's hottest "trucks" are often based on tubular steel chassis originally designed for drag racing or paved-oval Modifieds. One team famously used to use a mid-1960s Corvette body turned around backwards, with the fastback rear window serving as a driver's windshield and the engine bay, less hood, as a hose bed.
Where these contests exist, almost all in New York, they're big, big stuff. Millions were first exposed to firemen's jousts during the 1960s when ABC's Wide World of Sports, which had a top producer living on Long Island, discovered them. Their proximity and low production costs made them staple segments on the program, like figure-eight racing and demolition derbies from nearby Islip Speedway. A Web site specializing in the drills, www.nysdrillteams.com, lists well over 100 fire companies with drill teams, about 75 percent from Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island.
In April of 1963, a devastating massive fire strained the NYC fire service to the absolute breaking point while destroying millions of $ of property, so they decided that WASN'T going to happen again, and developed the Mack Super Pumper system
The truck, tender, and satellite units were all housed in a specially built station that was located to give them the best response time to downtown and points outside of the city. Here we see the pumper rig and tender leaving the station. The Satellite trucks would normally get on scene first to lay out their positions and prepare to get hooked to the pump.
Notice that the water cannons are off fire dept boats
Mack was awarded the contract to build the truck in 1964.
The top speed of the whole rig was 42mph but since it was intended for responding to calls in the city, high mph was not as much a concern as maneuverability, and the ability to zip around at lower speeds happily.
In 1967 the Super Pumper responded to a fire at a postal annex in NYC and managed to supply water to the massive gun on the tender truck, its three satellite units, two tower ladder trucks, and a portable manifold with multiple hand lines all by itself.
The hoses on the truck were pressure tested to 1,000psi of pressure but typically operated anywhere in the 350-800psi range depending on the situation. This is way higher what modern trucks use by our understanding. The hoses were a derivative of hoses developed by the Navy in WWII for high pressure applications and while incredibly heavy when compared to modern hoses, they were cutting edge at the time.
The keystone of the whole operation was the massive central pumping unit that could draw water from eight hydrants at once, drop lines into bodies of water, supply a mind-boggling number of lines with water simultaneously, and flow over 10,000 gallons per minute at low pressures if the situation called for it. When the pressure was ramped up to to 350psi, it could move 8,800 GPM. This was enough to supply the other satellite trucks as well as feed a massive water cannon on the tender truck that could heave water over 600ft.
The grunt for the Super Pumper system came from a Napier-Deltic diesel engine. This was an engine designed by the British during WWII as a lightweight, high speed means to propel their ships and locomotives.
Making 2,400 horsepower and even more prodigious torque numbers, the engine was “light” enough to be mounted in a trailer behind a tractor and carted around.
The engine’s design is interesting in the fact that it had three crankshafts and was an opposed piston style engine meaning that the pistons travel at each other.
With turbochargers and a two stroke design, it was as mighty a compact piston powered engine the world had ever known to that point. It was thirsty, 137 gallons of diesel fuel per hour and the noise was so deafening that firemen near the truck had to wear hearing protection.
By the time of its retirement in April 1982, FDNY's super pumper had responded to more than 2,200 calls, and it even took over the task of a failed pumping station in the city's municipal water supply at one time.
There is even a book: "The Super Pumper System" by John A. Calderone - The entire history of the Super Pumper is covered: from its basic concept, awarding of the contract to Mack Trucks in 1963; construction, selection of firehouses and personnel, official acceptance and placement in service in 1965, gradual decline in the 1970’s, and eventual elimination from active service in 1982.
it's now in a museum in Bay City Michigan
http://toyandfiretruckmuseum.org/
http://www.firechief.com/2016/01/08/the-greatest-fire-pumper-the-world-has-known/
http://bangshift.com/bangshiftxl/mack-super-pumper-system-locomotive-engine-powered-pumper-extinguish-hell-often/
