I seem to end up getting off brand and odd stuff at work over everyone else. I love the challenge of it and am just kinda curious to see what everyone else has been surprised to see. here is my personal favorite, It was at a pumpkin patch up the road and the operator was complaining about low power. We had rebuild the pump 2 years prior but it was still powered by the original 1981 buick v6. any time I'd crank down on the load tester, the engine would fall flat on its face.
$3,000,000 german made automated bread baking oven has to rank up there.
This is the oldest thing I every worked on! Wish I had thought to get some before pictures and some of the actual work in progress. It was cut out of a hedge row and they told us to get it running. Myself and another mechanic were givin', job of getting the motor to run again. It's a long story about the things we had to do to make it run again but we did it. One of the shop welders more or less built the cab from sheet metal using the original for patterns. I believe the only major original sheet metal used was the hood. I got to drive it around the shop some when it was done. Now I know what "Drives (Rides) Like a Mack Truck" really means! Not real sure where it is these days, it was used in some local parades and car shows for a few years.
Got a call from a guy years back asking if I would come look at his neighbors generator engine as that was his only electricity. Summer temps in Arizona, not a time to lose power. I get there to find a 2 cylinder Diesel from China that was the size of a Volkswagon, a flywheel the size of a wagon wheel, and just plain crude everything. Asked if he had a manual. Yep, no problem he says. All in Chinese. They had pictures of this thing mounted in boats, farm tractors, you name it. After going over all the pictures and diagrams and about 4 hours later it finally came to life. He asks me how much he owes me. Guy who owns it is about 80 years old living by himself. Found out his kid set up the gen set then left the old guy to fend for himself. Told him $20.00 would cover it. Lesson learned ? Ask what make engine you would like me to look at BEFORE saying "yeah, I can get it running"
First week working in the workshop at a civils company, called into the manager's office; "Do you know what a Zamboni is?" "No" "That's OK, you'll pick it up as you go along. Here's the address" Turns out the owner of the company also owned a skating rink and ice hockey team. Within a month I was fully conversant in Zamboni VW engines, leaky old 1950s ammonia refrigeration plants, skate sharpening machines and young skater chicks. (Best time to be at the rink is during the week, all the professionals come out to practise ) Also had to work on the hockey team tour bus, but that's another story
Went to work for the Komatsu dealer in 1990. Got sent to the Seahawks practice facility. I was told their film platform didn't work. Turned out it was a scissors lift that went up in the air 60 feet. They had a camera man film the practices. The control cord that went from the relay box snaked in Z fashion from the relay box all the way to the control box. Anyway the cannon plug at the bottom of the platform had the green powder growing out like a fungus. I touched the back of the plug and all twenty one wires fell out. No problem I thought, just get the wiring diagram, a new cannon connector and put it back together. Didn't quite work out that way. The makers of the lift went bankrupt shortly after the football team purchased it. All they had was an owner's manual which basically said keep the batteries charged and which switches and buttons did what. I spent the rest of that day finding a 24 wire Komatsu connector, skinning wires back and tracing relay box connections all the way up to the new connector. I got the thing to mostly work the next day. The three speed travel wouldn't work right. I finally got the thing working right on a swing by on the way home from another job a week later. Once all that worked I filled the back of both sides of the connector with hot glue to seal it all off and I never heard back from them again. The service manager told me a month later that they did pay the bill and were going to try running the thing another year or two. It was amazing being there when practice was going on. The stars would come over wondering why the team would go through fixing this thing instead of buying a whole new lift. All I could tell them was that it seemed like all the money was going into player salaries.
JohnC Do you remember the brand name of that lift?
I don't remember but for some reason Sky Horse sticks in my head. It was painted a shade of green that wasn't the teams colors.
V-12 EMD locomotive engines...
I work on a lot of dozers but this is the only pitbull I've ever seen. Guy told me he had a little dozer that needed work so assumed a d3 or something similar. Lol. Little booger is pretty cool though. Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2
I was an electrician for a company that builds machines used in factory automation. One of the last machines I worked on before retiring was a machine that was one small part of a factory assembly line that made flexible solar panels to be used as roofing. Sort of like shingles that could make electricity to power the building they were attached to. Our part of the project was small in the scheme of things but the machine was still a monster in size, took up about 60 x 100 feet of floor space. It was poorly conceived and engineered from the start, and even more poorly managed. When it finally shipped it was nearly 20 man years over budget. Our part of the assembly line worked okay when the customer bought it off, but they could never get other parts of the automation to work and they scraped the whole project about 3 years later.
I Have worked on alot of off the wall things. I worked for about a year at a close hanger factorie. I hated that job at first and wanted to quit but i stuck it out and realy started to like it. The machines i think were made in the 40s and were very very hard to keep runing. I worked the third shift. The 1st and 2 shift had 3 guys to keep them runing but i was the only one on my shift and we some times turned out more hangers than first and always turn out more than 2shift.They tried to get me some help but no one would stick with it. One guy that stayed the longest broke down and cried before he quit. I would have stayed their and worked for along time but the plastic hanger took over and the company went out of bussiness. The hardware were i live uses a very old cashregister i dont pretend to know how it works but between me and a buddy that also buys alot of stuff there we have been able to fix it.
Funny you mention that. I once got called out to a local industrial plant for a "heavy equipment jumpstart". Turned out to be an Alco locomotive with a 64 volt battery bank. SA200 lincoln welder to the rescue, after I figured out where to hook up.
I got messed in those things once. Alco S-6 yard switchers. 3 of us, a mechanic, an electrician, and a welder restored 6 of them top to bottom, total updates and rebuilds. took 2 years. We had a set of booster cables. I don't know what gauge they were but I couldn't move them around by myself. It was a 2-man job.
Yair . . . We had a company at one stage . . . just four of us hands on and we hand built two of these in three years. Cheers.
Between 2002 and 2004 I was working 4 an exploration company, as per usual some how I got mixed up with the matience crew and ended up working on a range of exploration drilling rigs. The one that springs to mind was a custome built rig based on wats called a UDR 650 mounted on 30 tone digger tracks wat a machine. It had a 3306 cat powering a screw type popper valve style compresser Made by sullair. Now I don't remember the size but a strait six Cummings running a set of 3 piggyback hyd pums that ran the rig the head rotation traverse and a whole heap of outer stuff. The toolmaker turner groaned every time I started walking in his direction. The skimatic specialist hated me as these machines need case drain as well as in and out, case drain is constant hyd fluid movement so as to help keep things cool whilst main ting pressure combined with the need 4 variable pound controll and the need to close a circet with gate valves and not blow the rest of the system.ive never been the same since I think a part of my brain imploded ill c if I can find some picks.
T-54 Tank carriage with a wheel ditch cutter
I ran a screw machine that cut small brass fittings that were chromed later. One of my orders were for " circumcision bells" looked like small dinner bells. I made two sizes were called white and black. Apparently they were used as a guide for the scalpel.
I worked on a railroad spiker. Kinda off the wall for a truck mechanic but it needed fixing.
Some people's off the wall stuff is just another day at the slave shop. I've been inside more than one cheese machine. Like to tell folks I had cheese between my toes. Vadgastat an nasal spray filling and packaging machines. A 22 stand hot rolling bar mill answering mill calls (German made) Long welds on beds for 200 ton haul trucks (new) Machines for making fancy dinner China like used in a five star restaurant. 33 k foot gas well, casing cutting pulling and well abandonment Drill under the Erie Barge Canal to install fiber optic.
Google Image amphi-rollers. Used for turning up mud ponds to get the caustic residue up to the surface so the sun can evaporate. Awesome to watch in action!
antique spinach harvesters. The boss bought them out of fencerows. We planted spinach, spent a few days welding, repairing, and swapping to build 5 machines out of 6. The first day we start with 5 ready and end with 2 running. That was the great day. Most days if one was still cutting when we quit, it was a good day.
I got a call many years ago to look at a D3 that had been modified to dig trees at a nursery. Similar to this............ You could walk under the skidpan. Also had to check a leak on a D8K once that was working with scrapers. The job was at a golf course that they were going to build houses on. Had enough of laying in the mud so I pulled it onto one of the greens to work on it. Wish I had a picture!
Hi. When I was on the spanners we had a job come up on a water pump engine blowing heaps of white smoke. Turns out this was slightly unusual. 20' container size unit with a cab to sit in and drive it. Triplex pump 15 speed road ranger and a 16v71t. Was being used as a replacement for blasting at north parkes mine by the csiro. Pumped 60000 kpa pressure, 2 inch hose.
Larc v
No clue why the pic ended up upside down....
I have rebuilt a 1943 Russell Bro tug boat. Used it to float equipment across a flooded lake with a 40 by 80 foot barge. Stupid thing is I put it in a lake to test it and ended up running it till it got impounded for lack a registration lack of a licensed captain...apparently apparently mechanic doesn't qualify as a captain. And I did try bull cropping them and telling them was just test driving it
I get plenty of Nutty tasks, 1 was to hoist a Gold and Silver statue up a stair landing a hight of 128 ft, the statue was in a packing crate with a Gross weight around the 800kgs spot, the box then had to be winched-hand balled up the last stair case into an Art Gallery, the statue had a ticket price of £4'500'000 (Sterling) so it was a slight worry, this also involved an air flight to Hong Kong in the posh seats (£4'600 return) plus a good bit of euphoria to me until I was told to fly back out in a few months time and lower it down the stair well and load it onto a small truck, everything went well including the fact that I grabbed all the tasty snack bars to have with my sandwich back home off the Air N-Z Plane, this is not the most valuable thing I have been involved with moving, but 128 ft is a lot of hight to winch by hand, I do have photo's of this job including the Artist involved. tctractors p.s. Hong Kong should to be called "Ting Tong" as even the food was a Drama, I am like a 6yr old kid with food so finding something that I didn't want to spit out was tough.
senior year in high school, ag coop teacher made us all learn a service manual and get credit from the manufacturer for learning the repair and maintenance. I picked a John Deere range cuber! It was different but I never saw one in person, did solve the problem the factory made us figure out though..... Oh, and there was the soft serve ice cream machine at the cafe where my wife worked when we first got married, she told the owner, he works on anything...... guess she had that much faith in me, I did get fixed, replaced all the bearings in it.
Makes the "Rumble Strips" alongside the road.
I would have to say this only because I'm a truck mechanic, it was slow one Saturday and I got sent out. I guess we were the only shop that answered the phone.