Barn Find Cummins

A 1943 military Generator With 69 Hours

- Jim Allen

Barn finds are the big thing these days and rare muscle cars or exotics usually get the hoopla. Why can’t old diesels share in the joy? Why not indeed... so here’s an extremely low-hour 1943 military generator that was hardly used by the army, sold surplus around 1950 and never used by the civilian buyer. It’s the diesel equivalent to the old jeep-in-a-crate story.

The equipment used by a wartime army is staggering in both volume and variety. From pencils to bombers! And, of course, generators. The unit shown here is a 1943 PE245A Signal Corps set that was commonly packaged with a portable microwave radar set, used in World War II, the SCR-615, which had a range of up to 50 miles. It was mainly used for ground controlled interception but anti-aircraft artillery could also use it for height finding to set their fuses.