Memories of a Grandfather
I got a call from a young working man, a couple of month’s ago. He said that he had an old gas pump that belonged to his Grandfather. He had taken the doors off in an attempt to start to restore the pump and became overwhelmed. Lucky for us, he was searching the web and discovered our site. He sent a few pictures and we decided to give it a try. He lives in Pennsylvania so we agreed to pick it up for him. It was in very bad shape. Basically it was a basket case with parts missing and other parts unusable. Dented and broken. Things needed welding and fabrication. We have had worse but because of his attachment, we took extra care to do a good job. The attached picture shows the completed pump uopn delivery several weeks ago. It was so nice to see the appreciation on Chris’ face and know that we were able to keep part of his Grandfather’s memory alive for years to come.
The fun part about this business is meeting interesting people and discovering things they have hidden away, awaiting restoration. This was the case about two months ago. We got a referral from one of our good customers. The lady who called mentioned that the family was in the oil business and that we had some of the same friends. We met and I was pleasantly surprised by some very nice but very rough gas pumps. She wanted to have a pump for the office, so we took a 900 Series Gilbarco out of their collection to bring back to life. Years ago, the company was an Esso dealer. We opted to do that type of rework on the old pump. I think it turned out pretty good? Our customer seemed happy too!