Primarily Petroliana Shop Talk Forums Shop Talk Petroliana Forums General Petroliana Discussion Tokheim 39 Tall Paint Scheme

Question for the group. I am working on a 1950 Tokheim 39 tall (my first pump). I was hoping to restore it to its original brand, but did not find any markings under the MFA blue.

The sides and top were originally painted red and then MFA blue (2 layers total). The doors have quite a few layers of paint, with the first coat being yellow (5 layers total).

Does anyone know if these pumps were refurbished and put together with mismatched doors? It seems unlikely that the sides and top stayed red, while the doors went from yellow-blue-green-grey-blue.

There are no holes for signs other than the Lead plates. There are no signs of decals or stickers under the paint.

Any suggestions? If the doors are original, that would make me lean more towards a Shell pump with red sides and top, and yellow doors. I know I can just pick a brand, but I would really like to figure out the original brand. If nothing else, I’ll just pick a brand that used red pumps. Thanks!

John Margoles once commented on the "Ubiquitous use of RED Pumps in one of his service station books of the late 1980's , early 1990's . Red was more or less synonymous with flammable liquids .Shell, Signal, Esso, Standard Indiana , kyso, The Yellow bumped my curiosity me as it could well have been Richfield oil ....

I flipped through PCM guide to pump resto, understand it is not all inclusive of course, but only ones with red sides, yellow doors were Erickson, Imperial, and Keystone Powerfuel. Shell was pictured in reverse colors.

Not that this would stop me from just picking a brand I liked and going for it!

When a new pump was introduced, the pump companies prepared a 2-4 page brochure describing all the features of the pump. A few of these brochures were prepared for a certain oil company, but 99.99% were strictly generic. As I mentioned the brochure gave all the details including the weight (in the create), the height. Usually the last thing they mentioned was the color. It usually said: :The standard (not Standard Oil) color of pump is red, but for $...00 additional (usually around $2-3.00) the pump will be painted a color of your choice.

Most pump companies had distributers usually referred as a service station equipment company. These companies purchased pumps usually in quantity, and put them in the warehouse. This way they could show the customer what the pump looked like and explain all the benefits of the pump. Again these pump were painted red.

If a new pump replaced an old pump it was usually sold to the equipment company and they either sold it to a company that rebuilt pumps, or possibly the equipment company did there own rebuilding. Rebuilt pumps was a big business. Two of the biggest companies were PMP located in Connecticut and ParTe in Indiana. Rebuilt pumps were sold to smaller oil companies who could not afford a new pump. Most of these stations would repaint the pump. Small stations out at the junction of two roads would probably just leave them the color they were. Many of these used pump wound up on farms. The local oil & gas distributor would give a farmer a pump providing the farmer purchased his oil and gas from the oil distributor. Of course, these pump were not usually painted since the gasoline was not being sold.

So, if the original color of the pump was red it could very likely have been purchased from a local equipment company and either repainted while new, or just left that way.

Keep in mind, not all pumps were sold for use in service stations. Taxi companies usually had a pump at their garage, same with trucking companies. Don't make assumptions, just remove all the paint, primer it, let it sit for a few weeks while you look at pictures of pumps and decide what to restore it to.

Jack Sim