Newest acquisition - Tome Coca Cola

[Creighton]

The WE-6 bandstage mounted on at least a 1 ton truck is a hoot (page 2). Thanks for the pics!!
Creighton

[VMC 81]

a lot of the stuff out of Mexico is beat since they use it to the  bitter end and when broken it will be fixed anyway possible. Which from what I have seen  means it is a hack job that may not be easy to reverse.

[collecture]

OK - Here is the scoop. I spoke with Julian yesterday for a long time - funny how you can speak with someone you've never met for a long time about soda machines - maybe that is why this site is so good?

Anyway, in Mexico you have a group of guys called pickers and they will go into the farms and small towns and find these coolers, machines, pedal cars etc and bring them to the border towns where guys like Julian will buy the machines. Their school of thought is that they will get more money for it if it is not all rusty and so they cut out the rusty areas and rough patch it. Julian said you can tell them until you are blue in the face to NOT cut it up, but they still do. A couple of dollars more is a lot to them.
Unfortunately, this is what has happened to my cooler. According to him, it originally had a pot metal drain bent at 90 degrees and coming out the side with a cap on it. The pot metal easily rusted out over time and then the water would leak out into the bottom of the cooler rusting it out eventually.
The sides of this cooler had a 90 degree lip on the bottom. Two flat pieces of sheetmetal went over the lip and insulation kind of like the overlapping pieces on the bottom of a bow out chest. Three cross bars were screwed in over the metal and into the lip with the middle crossbar covering the overlap of the sheet metal pieces. I am not sure if there were other screws around the perimeter or just in the crossbar supports, but I imagine there was.

So it is a start. Julian knows where one still is and is going to get me some pictures of it at some point.