The Siren Board

So I get a email from a kind gentleman named Joseph asking for any info or assitance for his Mobile Directo siren.

He worked for a construction/demolition company, and when he was going to demolish a building near Allen Bradley in Milwaukee, he came across this siren on the corner of the building, all dilapitated. He remembered the Mobile Directos from Milwaukee from his childhood, and He asked his foreman if he could have them take it off the building before they tore it down. SO that was that and now after 6 years of being in Joe's possesion, it is time to be pulled out and restored to operational condition.

WHen I first talked to him, I was surprised to hear it was a GASOLINE powered mobil Directo, with the 25HP Wisconsin air-cooled V4 engine.

So I asked him if he was doing anything today, he said no, he is laid off, and welcomed me to come down to see it.

So I hopped on my motorcycle and headed down to his country pole shed to see the beast.

I was wonderfully surprised by this...

Great photos, Jerry. Nice to see one of Milwaukee's original Mobil Directos still exists.


Here's a news article I found about Milwaukee area installing a new system. I'd think this would be around the time this Mobil Directo was installed. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=oB ... rens&hl=en

That stuff is straight up AWESOME. Thank you.

How old is it? See if you can obtain it, that`s a nice find, where I am, we have mobil-directo`s from the 50`s and the 60`s but none of them are gas.

When I arrived, the first thing we started doing was spaying every dang fastener we could get at with PB Blaster. (not hard to do on old American machinery)

I will let you know the siren is NOT a rust bucket, but has a light coating of surface rust and oxidized red-lead paint.

After we sprayed everything with the penetrant, we decided to check the engine oil. It looks like someone poured it in just yesterday. Nice golden color, still smells and feels like motor oil, hot dog.
So we go one step further, and decide to see if we can pull out the ancient Champion 8COM sparkplugs that reside in the big V4. Joe gets a socket wrench and POP-POP-POP-POP, all four spark plugs pop freely from the clinches of the cylinder heads. They look almost new, with nice sharp electrodes. It looks like the last time the siren ran, it ran great, as the electrodes all had a nice tan-brown color to them.

We then poured a little bit of oil into each of the cylinder bores and cranked the engine by hand with the supplied auxiliary hand crank (see control box picture above to see where that is stored) The engine turned over smoothly and with good compression, squirting the oil all over the shop from the spark plug holes.

Does it have spark? Will it crank under using the electric starter??? All if the electronic components (Starter, generator, and Distributor) thankfullly are standard auto-type 6 volt Autolite brand. Easy to rebuild, and parts are still availible.
We connect a high-amp 6volt battery charger to the battery cables of the siren. We turn on the ignition, and hit the starter button..............


CruchhhhhwRuhRuhRuhRuhRuhRuhRuhRuhRuhRuh the pinion gear on the starter take a few tries to extend it from its long slumber, and finally engages to the flywheel. The engine freaking cranks!!!

We crank it for about a minute to get some oil up into the top and an cylinder, all good now.
"Lets check for spark now", says Joe. So we click one of the Champions into one of the wires, and hold it up to the block.
And we hit the starter button.....

Nothing, dangit!

I figure the points are probably corroded. So we get a piece of aluminum oxide sand paper (silicon carbide works better) and sand the points.

Still nothing

We spend the rest of the afternoon playing with 6volt coils and and condensers, cleaning terminals. Nothing. EVerythign seems to be in spec, the coil is getting power, the points have power to them, etc. Joe and I call it quits for today. Nothing to get frusterated about, the distrbutor needs to be rebuilt anyway.
He knows of a man in Milwaukee who rebuilds old and antique automotive distributors and electrical equipment, so that will probably be our next move.

The Wisconsin uses a battery ignition system, it is NON magneto.

TBOLT1000 wrote:How old is it? See if you can obtain it, that`s a nice find, where I am, we have mobil-directo`s from the 50`s and the 60`s but none of them are gas.

Joseph does NOT want to sell it AT ALL, we want to get it running and restored (hopefully for independance day, we'll see), for his enjoyment, and so we could possibly take it to steam and gas shows, etc. Whats nice with it being Gas, you dont need a source of high-voltage single or three phase power to get it going.

We see the thing so special about getting it running is that if we do, it will be the only known Gasoline Mobil Directo in the world to be operational.

Very cool! Keep us posted on how its coming along and look forward to seeing it up and running.