RR 5, Box 301 -C Charleston, West Virginia 25312
For years my husband Mark, who by trade is an electrician, has
collected and restored antique gas and oil well engines and
tractors. He loves to go to engine shows and admire all the
beautifully restored engines and talk with the men who share the
same love of engines. One day he began dreaming of an engine that
would do something, or maybe even do many things. The picture in my
mind was totally different from the picture in his mind. I imagined
a table top type of exhibit, while he had much bigger things in
mind.
Do- All Machine
Mark began collecting ‘treasures’ from dumpsters and
from people who were getting rid of their ‘junk.’ After a
few years of collecting rusty old pipes, bearings, tattered belts,
engines, chains, blowers, and gears, he was ready to begin. He
began by mounting a 10 HP Witte natural gas oil well engine (that
he had restored) to a 15 ft. flat bed trailer. From that one
engine, the rest of the equipment that he mounted to the trailer
functions through a chain reaction of belts, pulleys, gears, wheels
and pumps. Mark worked every spare minute for fourteen months
sandblasting, cutting, welding, painting, experimenting and
attaching the many fascinating items that are part of his
‘Gunderson’s Do-All Machine.’ Mark’s friends tease
him, saying that the only trouble he had while putting it all
together was the electrical work.
Some of the items included on the trailer are a water pump
impeller, an automatically reversing worm gear, a governor/gas
valve from a 20 HP JC engine, a floating gear, a blacksmith
blower/bubble maker, a DC 110 volt generator and lights, a bicycle
light generator, a 38 to 1 gear reducer, cutaways of a Jeep CJ5
transmission, a Trans Am engine, 301 cubic inch (325 individual
pieces), a truck rear end, and a Wankel rotary engine from a Mazda
RX-7. There is a fan blower that I painted to make look like a
clown. Mark affectionately refers to it as the ‘Nagging
Wife.’ (Trust me, there is no resemblance.)
There is also one-half of a Wright Cyclone R26OO 1700 HP radial
engine that came out of a B-25 Mitchell Bomber that crashed on
Spruce Knob, West Virginia, in 1950. It was the hardest piece to do
a cut-away on.
Mark enjoys taking his 5,500lb.’Do-All Machine’ to
engine shows. He hopes that he can use it to help educate people,
especially his own seven and five year old daughters, who have made
crayon drawings of machines for Daddy to put on the ‘Do-All
Machine.’ He is always looking for an odd gear or interesting
piece to add to the machine.
