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Last year I needed a trailer to do some heavy hauling and because I couldn’t use the trailer that the whistles were on for anything as they were mounted permanently I decided to order a new 20-foot heavy-duty utility trailer with dual axle brakes. I did this with the thought in my mind that at some point I was going to make a bigger whistle trailer.
Subsequently, in my travels one day I stumbled across a nearly new 1000-gallon tank and seemed like just what I needed for the new set up. It was 16 feet long and 42” in diameter, which seemed like the perfect size. My most recent acquisition for the project is an Ingersol screw compressor, which is run off a 4-cylinder water-cooled gas engine. It pumps 100 cfm @ 100 psi. I picked it up at an auction for not too much money and it seems like an efficient way of pumping the big tank.
So now I have three of the four major components, the trailer, the tank, the compressor and all I need to do now is to build a new manifold. I am at this juncture tinkering around with various possibilities on the design. The manifold will this time likely be 3” pipe rather that 2” so that I can put some of my 10” chimes and one or more 10”x32” steamship whistles or maybe try to blow my 12” Lonergan chime off the tank. One factor that I am concerned about is that by adding these big whistles to the trailer, I will be adding quite a bit of additional weight. I will have to keep that weight low on the trailer so as not to make the whole thing top-heavy.
I will probably start putting this new project together sometime this fall. And hopefully it will be ready to be christened next spring as “Little Toot II”.
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