Phillyrube said:
Yep, and I LOVE watching the rotators stop spinning when the Q is tripped...heheheheheh
OH.....do I remembers those days! The reason the Qs stopped the beacons was because the old ambulances had generators, not alternators. When I worked for Rix Funeral Home in Odessa, we had a 1959 Pontiac station wagon ambulance that had a roof-mounted Q with a pair of Carpenter lights next to it and a 17 beacon behind it. When you stepped on the Q, the beacon stopped and the Carpenter lights dimmed for a second. Long before I ever saw that car, I happened to be riding with my dad one day,and we were stopped at a busy intersection. I heard a siren come up behind us and turned to see a white '58 Chevy wagon ambulance approaching. When it got to the intersection the underhood siren was wound up. The beacon had stopped completely, but the two red lights on the fenders were blinking. I didn't understand auto electrics back then, so I just thought that something was wrong with their beacon.
Worst thing I ever got into was in 1976, when he had just bought a nice '65 Pontiac Consort from a private ambulance co. When they had it in service it had a VisiBar with the twin red beacons and a CP25 speaker powered by a Director. But when we got the car the roof was bare. We put a pair of 175 beacons of the front corners with a Q in the center. Between the Q and front beacons was a pair of red DoRay lollipops, and it had a blue Dietz 211WW beacon behind the Q. On our first run, which was from a racetrack about 20mi. SE of Lubbock, we headed to Methodist Hospital with a patient. Being a Sunday afternoon there wasn't much traffic, so I was only using the Q lightly. We also had an Interceptor with an underhood speaker. We made it into town just fine, but as we reached the last major intersection, still about a mile from the hospital, the Q wouldn't roll over. So we completed the run with the electronic siren. As we rolled into the ER drive where the ER was all glassed in, I noticed that the beacons were dim and barely spinning. So I let the car run and when we came out everything worked fine. But we had a second run from the same track and the same thing happened. Monday morning it went to a starter/alternator shop. The guy called me at work and said that it just needed a higher-amped alternator. Someone had put a 35 amp. alternator on it. The Pontiac Consorts came from Superior with a 55 amp alternator that worked just fine. So he put a 65 amp alternator on it and we never had problems out of it again. It makes me wonder, though, how some of the ambulances I saw as a kid that were really decked out with Qs and all sorts of lights made it without the car stalling in the middle of the road!
