Ridgecrest USO Building Fire Horne

[Skip Gorman]

Hello, Gamewell Diaphone Forum! I am a metal artist out here in the Upper Mojave Desert and was asked to place our old USO building's volunteer fireman's horn on a display tripod to grace the old firehouse nearby. All I know about it is that it used to be on the roof and was actually working around 1970. Well, I have it in my shop and I welded-up the tripod stand for it (the Gamewell horn and cast housing is connected through a vertical 1" galvanized pipe to a regulator and sequencer. I found a service pressure tank in the USO building just above the performance stage but did not bring it down from where it is.
So, now that the horn is mounted on a tripod, with each foot welded to a pad which will be bolted to the concrete outside the fire station, I became interested to see what it might take to get this system operational. See, years ago, when we first moved out here to work as an engineer at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, this horn would sound-off sometimes late at night to call a bunch of heroic volunteers out of bed to face a common threat to our desert town. It gave us a sense of community which I want to resurrect. So I began to take our diaphone apart.
Sadly, after many years of idle disuse under the desert sun, the piston had deteriorated into a perforated grey mass naturally welded to its (brass?) enclosure. I carefully chipped it out and cleaned-up the (brass?) cylinder to it's original state (with some minor scratches). The big question is: Is it possible to obtain a replacement piston? How shall I go about this? Please advise. Thank you!

[Jim]

Skip:
Welcome to the Forum and good on you for thinking about getting a Diaphone sounding again.
There is a lot of information here about doing so.
There is an active, overlapping group on Facebook that you should join and ask about pistons or whatever. Just search Gamewell.

[Skip Gorman]

Jim, thanks. Please tell me what are my chances of obtaining an aluminum piston for our diaphone. Have others been successful? Do they cost a lot? Are they being manufactured? Is there a fabrication drawing or them? I'm getting zero responses elsewhere on these questions.

[Jim]

I am pretty sure that there are used pistons, both aluminum and bronze, available out there.
Give it a little more time,
I forwarded your post to the Facebook group. You should join it yourself if possible.