Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The Haiti Generator Repair Story


                                           The Haiti Generator Repair Story
                                                               1971
                             This is a true story that happened to me in Haiti     
                               Written 12/20/2013 and Re-written 9/6/2016
                                                     Howard Yasgar

     Up until the  960’s all automobiles had a 6 or 12 volt DC Generator on them, they were used to  charge the cars battery.
     The generator with its pulley was usually mounted on the side of the engine,  and was connected to the engine by a fan belt.
     As the engine ran it turned the generator charging the cars battery.
     At the time this incident happened, I had a company in Miami that rebuilt automotive generators and sold them wholesale in Florida and for export.
     It was February 1971 when I was in Port Au Prince Haiti calling on customers.
     I had brought along one of my good friends, Paul Sherlock.
     Paul was one of my parts suppliers in Miami, and like me, he was very familiar with the rebuilding of automotive DC generators.
     You could say that both Paul and I were both pretty much professionals in the rebuilding of automotive DC generators.
     So when this story happened neither of us could believe what was going on,  and if we weren’t actually there to see it all happen I still wouldn’t believe it.

    Most of my Haitian customers were located in the city of Port Au Prince, so Paul and I were staying at the convenient Castle Haiti Hotel, and we were using my usual cab driver Toni Richmond.
     I had known Toni Richmond for quite a few years, he drove a 1956 black dodge automobile that was now beginning to show its age.
    On this particular morning, as we were having breakfast at the hotel, Toni appeared to be very nervous, so I asked him what was going on?   
    Toni was constantly looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching us and he then removed an official ballot from his shirt pocket.
     Toni said there was an election going on that day.
     I found out later that is wasn’t really an election as we know it, it was what was later called a plebiscite.
     At the time Haiti was run by a dictator Dr. Francois Duvalier, also was also called Papa Doc.
     Papa Doc, was running a sham election that day to appoint his son Jean Claude to succeed him as president of Haiti for life.  
    We didn’t know it at the time, but we were in Haiti the very day that Papa Doc had chosen to hold his plebiscite.
    When Toni drove downtown, we could see that the Haitian army was already trucking in hundreds of peasants from the countryside, they were  all waving small black and red Haitian flags.
     Papa Doc wanted this fake election to look legitimate to everyone, because he later reported that 99 percent of the population of Haiti had voted yes for his son to succeed him.
     There were just too many people in Port Au Prince that day, so I asked Toni to drop us off to at one of my customer’s store, and I told him he should come by and pick us up later, after he had finished voting.
    The particular customer I wanted to see that morning was a fellow named Hermon Francoise.
    Hermon came to Miami twice a year to buy used automobile starters and generators, he then shipped to Haiti as scrap metal.
    Once he had the used starters and generators in Haiti, he washed them in kerosene and then sold them as rebuilt.
    After Toni had voted, he came by and picked us up, he was excited and said that there was something going on that he wanted to show us.
    Toni then drove to the Haitian palace.
    It was difficult to do as the streets were swarming with people in town for the election.
    When we got to the palace, I could see  a long row of foreign news cameras were all set up on the lawn to film the event.
    Toni, slowly edged his way past the palace gates and started blowing his horn, the people must have thought we were some kind of foreign dignitaries and they began getting out of our way.
    Eventually Toni drove almost all the way up to within a few hundred yards of the palace.  
    We weren’t there for more than five minutes when I saw a short black fellow with grey hair and glasses, stepped out on the balcony and waved to everyone, I couldn’t believe it, it was Papa Doc himself.
    A moment later his son Jean Claude appeared, he was wearing a suit that seemed to twinkle in the bright sun.
    It was hot day and I was standing next to the passenger side door of Toni’s car.
    I looked up and I could  swear Papa Doc was waving to me, so I waved back.
    Within a few minutes, both the father and son stepped back inside the palace and the balcony doors closed behind them.
    Right away the crowds started to dissipate, and Toni started up the Dodge to leave.
    Were probably half way to the palace gates when I smelled rubber burning.
    I knew what the smell was right away, it was the smell of a cars fan belt burning, and
smoke and steam started coming out from under the cars hood.
    Toni saw the smoke and stopped the car.
    I said, shut off your motor, your fan belt is burning.
    We all got out of the car and Toni opened the hood, and just like I had said it was a burnt fanbelt.
    Toni reached in to the engine compartment and pulled out pieces of the shredded fan belt.
    When I saw him doing that, I reached in and tried turning the cars generator pulley, it was hot, and it didn’t turn at all.
    The diagnosis was simple, the ball bearing in the generator had gone bad, and that caused the generator’s armature to freeze up. Once the generator armature stopped turning, the fan belt instantly burned up.
    Once the engines fan belt burnt, it  caused the engines water pump to stop working and that overheated the radiator.
    I had seen this same problem many times before.
    I knew, that if I were in Miami, a good used, or rebuilt generator for Toni’s 1956 Dodge, could be bought in any junkyard for about $10.00, Chrysler product generators  were plentiful.
    So because of that, I wasn’t too concerned about Toni’s problem.
    Unfortunately I had forgotten for the moment that we were in a place like Haiti.
    After sitting there a few minutes while waiting for Toni’s car to cool down, Toni said he had a good friend up the street who was an automobile electrician.
    I told Toni,  we should be able to drive there once the car had cooled down a little.
    Toni was right, his friends shop was close by.
    However, I could see that the first problem was that the electricians shop was not actually a shop, They had a bench set up in an alleyway between two buildings.
    The work bench had some rusty tools on it, but other than that, the shop was just an empty space between two buildings.
    Behind the bench were two fellows who appeared to be taking a nap.
    Tony walked over to them, they woke up immediately and they all shook hands.
    We watched as Toni explained our problem to them.
     It didn’t take a mental giant to see the generator was seized up, but I could see Toni was talking to them like he was an expert on the subject.
    I walked over to the workbench, there was a broken butcher’s knife, a rusty pair of pliers and a medium sized beat up flat bladed Craftsman screwdriver with a chipped handle, they also had a carpenters hammer, but there was no test equipment of any kind in sight.
    Within a matter of  minutes, using only the rusty pliers the guys managed to remove the still hot generator.
    They placed the generator on the bench and disassembled it, again using only the pair of pliers and the screwdriver.
    With the generators burned out armature held in a rag, one of the men disappeared, but soon reappeared with the pulley removed off it.
    Using the hammer they removed the generators front plate from the armature and took out the ball bearing.
    The ball bearing was blue and several of the steel  balls were melted, it was what had caused the problem in the first place.
    I recognized the ball bearing was the most popular #203 bearing used in most all automobile generators.
    In Miami, I stocked hundreds of them, made in Japan, my cost was .35 cents each.
    By now several young boys were hanging around, and Toni was in a discussion with the mechanics regarding the ball bearing.
    They were talking in Patois, so I didn’t know what was being said, but I wanted something to get going.
     I took out a dollar bill and gave it to one of the kids who seemed to speak some English, and I told him to go find a new ball bearing.    
    Both Paul and I knew the generator rebuilding business, so we just assumed these guys also knew what they were doing.
    We had thought they would quickly find some good used parts or a good used generator and fix Toni’s car.
    Paul and I walked across the street to sit in  the shade.
    After about fifteen minutes passed, and we saw that no one had gone anywhere to look for anything, so we walked over to the car.
    Toni was laying in his cars driver’s seat taking a nap, so then we walked over to the mechanics bench.
    We were both absolutely stunned at what they were doing.
    They had removed all the burnt out copper wire from the generator armature, and they were attempting to replace the burnt wire with used copper wire they were peeling off a used 220 volt electric motor that they had sitting under their work bench.
    Paul and I both knew what was possible to be done to repair a generator and we knew what was not possible to be done.
    These guys were attempting the impossible, the used wire they were using wasn’t even close to the right size.
    When I saw this, I didn’t know what to say, I had never seen a more crazy idea in my life.
    However we  knew these guys were Toni’s friends, and I didn’t want to get into the middle of a confrontation with them.
    So for a moment Paul and I just stood there speechless.
    As we both stood there, the young boy returned with what was supposed to be the new ball bearing, and he handed it to me.
    Not only was it the wrong size bearing but it was burned out as well.
    It was a transmission bearing with a snap ring in it. not even similar to the generator bearing.
    I asked him where my dollar was, he said he paid a dollar for the bearing.
    Now realizing these guys were never going to fix Toni’s generator, Paul
and I sat down to discuss what we were going to do next.
    I knew at this point I had to say something to stop Toni’s friends from going any further and wasting any more of all of our valuable time.
    It was obvious that we would soon kill the entire afternoon waiting here with no hope of ever getting Toni’s car running again.
    Finally, I couldn’t take it any more, and I said to Toni, please stop these guys now.
    I said that Paul and I, will walk down the street to my friends store, and  buy a good used generator.
    Paul and I  then walked down the street to Hermon’s store to buy a good used Dodge generator.
    Once we were at Hermon’s store, we explained the generator problem to him, and he
said he had plenty of good Dodge generators, but he was sorry that he couldn’t sell us one.
    I was stunned, and I asked him how come he wouldn’t he sell me one.  He said it was because I knew how little he paid for the generators in Miami.
    So what I said.
    He said, “Haiti is a small country, and if I sell you a generator cheap, your cabdriver Toni Richmond will tell everyone in Port Au Prince the price, and  the whole city would soon know about it, and it would destroy my business.
    I said, Listen Hermon, give me a generator for free, and I will give you ten of them to replace it, next time you are in Miami.
    He thought about it a moment, and then he gave us a good used Dodge generator for free.
    Paul and I walked all the way back to Toni’s car, carrying the used generator on my shoulder.
    Toni was leaning against his car and he was smiling.
    We could hear  the car was running. The two electricians were nowhere to be seen.
     Paul and I knew they could never have fixed Toni’s generator, so what could they possibly have done?
     I opened the hood of Toni’s car, and to this day I can’t believe what I saw.
     Someone had found a used  Ford generator somewhere, and mounted it on Toni’s Dodge car, but because the generator was off a Ford, it didn’t fit the car right, they had wedged a big rock between the generator and the engine to hold it on tightly.
     
          
         
     
             

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