Thanks for the pictures of the Chrysler irrigation pump, which was very reminiscent of the local Gorman-Rupp ones that I was familiar with. The actual centrifugal pump end picture brought back a memory from my past.
During my high school years, I earned extra money during the summers by working on neighbours' tobacco farms. Tobacco crops thrive on hot weather, but because of the light sandy soil they grow in, the crops require irrigation. Water is provided from the irrigation pump at a pond by a system of aluminium pipes Each individual pipe is about 25' long and these interconnect to feed water to the fields. Smaller diameter field pipes ran off the larger trunk lines to specific areas of the field, between the rows of ripening tobacco. A typical lay of irrigation pipes had two sets of field pipes with rotating attached sprinklers running in different halves of the field. This way, as one area of the half field got adequate water, that line could be shut down, dissassembled, and relaid in the next dry section, while the second line still irrigated by the still-running pump. Once the first sprinkler line was relocated, reassembled and turned back on, this process would be repeated with the second line. Repeat until the whole crop was irrigated.
It was during one of these field line changes that my neighbour and I could hear the pump engine speed governor snap open and the engine revved way up, and then quit. We raced down to the irrigation pond, expecting to find some kind of catastrophic engine failure. A quick visual inspection revealed nothing amiss with the 251" Chrysler flat head industrial motor. A dipstick examination showed clean oil near the full mark. My boss hit the starter button, but the engine would not budge. We decided to pull the intake pipe out of the pond and check the box screen on the end of it. This filter can sometimes accumulate pond vegetation on it, limiting water intake. What we found was that the screen was pretty well ripped out of the box. Bad news! We suspected that a pond critter had been sucked into the pump and jammed it.
The rest of our afternoon was consumed with disassembling the centrifugal pump to find the remains of a large muskrat in it. What a mess, having to dig all that gore out of there. It was really wedged in there. Centrifugal pumps are favoured in applications such as this, and fire trucks, where certain amounts of impurities can pass through with no damage to the pump itself. But they were never designed to pass a whole muskrat! After reassembling the pump and repairing the box screen, the engine fired right up, and we were good to go, again. I would never have thought this situation could have stalled that 125 h.p. motor.
