MTFCA Forum

A couple years ago there were devastating forest fires in Eastern Washington state.
A Model T friend suffered a great loss including his shop and cars.
One specific casualty was his HCCT – it was burnt to a crisp.

The heat was so intense that it melted all of the internals of the meter, warped the meter faceplate, melted the magnet mounting spools, melted the brass magnet mounting screws, melted the babbitt shaft bearings, fried the inductor, and fried the field coil.

The only parts that could be salvaged were the frame, the hand crank, the shaft assembly, the flywheel and the inductor core.

The magnets get so hot that it must have changed the metallurgy as they would not take a charge when I tried to recharge them.

The biggest tasks were bead blasting and painting the salvaged parts and rewinding the inductor.
All of the rest of the parts were replaced.

The before and after are shown below.
           

That's amazing!

I'd guess the magnets were annealed by the heat. "Soft iron" is strongly attracted to magnetism, and it makes a good core for electromagnets, but it will not "hold" magnetism. In the 1950s, permanent magnets became commonplace for audio speakers and other uses. These were advertised as "ALNICO" magnets. The actual metal was hard but machinable.

Beautiful job Bob ! Name that HCCT - Phoenix

Bob simply incredible!