F-3 Airfield Refuler walk-around

On Tuesday night the Military Veterans Museum and Education Center took possession of a Truck, Fuel or Oil Servicing, 750 Gal., 2-1/2-ton, 6 X 6, F-3. Apparently this truck has quite a history, Tony Budge, Chet Krause, and Kevin Kronlund are a few of the previous owners of this vehicle. If anyone has any older pictures or more history of this vehicle we would be interested in hearing from you.

Yesterday I did a photo walk-around of the truck to document it's present condition. It has a Yale & Towne Manufacturing Company Tri-rotor Model 80BV pump installed. I made contact with Tri-rotor Company today and they have all the records of every pump they ever made (Tri-rotor was founded in the 1930's). They will be researching our pump to find out when it was manufactured and who it went to. They also have parts for every pump ever made so replacement parts should be no problem. I will keep you update as I find out more.

Anyway - on to the walk-around. It can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rlb_photog ... 671430322/
I have added many notes on the photos themselves (you have to hover over the box and a caption will pop up) and captions below. I would love to have your feedback on these photos and the truck as well.

~Robert

Nice truck ............Other than blistering paint thats a clean and solid truck .........Does it run as good as it looks ?? ............. Tim

We really need to do a paint job, that's for sure. We need to research paint schemes of WWII refuelers and see what we are going to do with it. We are going for 12th Air Force markings, that's for sure. Just need to find out if most 12th trucks were green or if some were yellow. I personally think a yellow truck would be nice. It would certainly stand out in a Museum dominated by Olive Drab!

As for the running part, I have a feeling once we drain the tank and run some good gas through it we will have a great runner. As it is now with the old gas it sounds nice so I can't wait to see how much better new gas will make it run.

~Robert

Received an email from Hank at Tri-rotor today. The pump is a Model 80BV variable volume pump equipped with a Manual Flow Control, serial number H600. Accorinding to thier records the pump was shiped from their factory to the U. S. Army Air Forces on September 14th, 1942.

Seems to me like we may have an original pump, what do you think?

~Robert