H.G.V.mechanic/fitters tales of trucks,drivers,and owners

h.g.v. mechanic/fitters tales.this thread should create some interest,as without them trucks don,y work.lets have all topics covered from trucks, drivers and relationships with owners. :laughing: :confused: :unamused: :bulb: :slight_smile:

shirtbox2003:
h.g.v. mechanic/fitters tales.this thread should create some interest,as without them trucks don,y work.lets have all topics covered from trucks, drivers and relationships with owners. :laughing: :confused: :unamused: :bulb: :slight_smile:

bet this is a good thread,will be on later,k2

lets start you off,driver came into the w/shop and said can you have a look at my back lights on the unit,yep i am up the yard,went up with tester,snips,tape,when a got there both back wing stays was up in the air.trailer he had got on had no front rope hooks so roped the load to the unit :open_mouth: best part about it was not a new driver :unamused: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: keith

I had a driver come in the yard one evening with a D800 rigid, he said the battery light had come on going through Warwick so he turned the key off to save the battery :open_mouth: It was still running when I went to look but the heat from it hit you about 10ft away, the exhaust manifold was almost white hot, yes the fan belt had broke and he ran it 40mls home. Switching it off there was a lot of tinkling and cracking as the valve inserts fell out of the cyl head. New engine and a new driver !

I got called out to a Volvo FL10,driver reckoned it had an air leak and he couldnā€™t move it.

On the way there Iā€™m thinking of all the possibilityā€™s that would cause the brakes to not release.

I get there build the air up no problem,jump out and walk around the truck and trailer listening for leaks,nothing significant. Back in the cab and release the park brake and I notice that the Broms brake button on the dash has popped out,push it in and the brakes release,all good.

Old mate had stopped for a while and must have slowly lost all the air,when this happens on a Volvo the Broms button,which is a Volvo safety feature will pop out and prevent the brakes from being released.

Old mate felt pretty silly,but said heā€™d not driven a Volvo before so didnā€™t know about the Broms button. I wonder how many blokes have been caught out by these.

For me easy money three hours call out for a five minute job,plus an hours drive.

On a Volvo bus, the Broms is virtually behind the drivers seat so unless youā€™ve got a head that could spin 180 degrees round, youā€™d never know itā€™s there!
I once went out to a wagon (T45 I think) and the driver said that the night heater was making funny noises and was giving off a pungent choking smell. Turned out heā€™d peed in a bottle some time before and the plastic had melted on the heater and the contents were shorting the circuit.

NZ JAMIE:
I got called out to a Volvo FL10,driver reckoned it had an air leak and he couldnā€™t move it.

On the way there Iā€™m thinking of all the possibilityā€™s that would cause the brakes to not release.

I get there build the air up no problem,jump out and walk around the truck and trailer listening for leaks,nothing significant. Back in the cab and release the park brake and I notice that the Broms brake button on the dash has popped out,push it in and the brakes release,all good.

Old mate had stopped for a while and must have slowly lost all the air,when this happens on a Volvo the Broms button,which is a Volvo safety feature will pop out and prevent the brakes from being released.

Old mate felt pretty silly,but said heā€™d not driven a Volvo before so didnā€™t know about the Broms button. I wonder how many blokes have been caught out by these.

For me easy money three hours call out for a five minute job,plus an hours drive.

i had a good one abit ago, stobart driver calls me out trailer brakes stuck on, get there see hes parked in a hole jumped in and off i pulled it out, 2 second job pitty the driver had just foned for another driver to take over his truck so we all witnessed it, mr stobart driver was not happy!! had to laugh

When I was on the spanners for George Read an ex army HGV driver came into the garage for help.I walked to the Leyland Comet to see what the problem was.He was trying to put the dipstick into the injector pump :blush: He had forgot where he had found it.Another Comet driver came in on a Monday night asking for his brakes to be relined.He said he had given them a lot of stick that day to get them sorted.Trouble was we had relined the whole lorry on Sunday,George was not happy.

we are doing o.k. here guys.what about good and lousy bosses.? must be some good tales.i give you a start. did a short stint for from Accrington,what a first class nob he washe used to have a spare truck in the compound the same as what ever he was running at the time,and all trucks had number plate,and vid plates drilled to same centres just in case one was off road or went for mot then it was a quick transplant.just one tale about . more to follow. :smiling_imp: :wink: :laughing:

More can follow, but without names please, otherwise they will be removed.
Such gossipy subjects are probably best dealt with by PMs. dd.

NZ JAMIE:
I got called out to a Volvo FL10,driver reckoned it had an air leak and he couldnā€™t move it.

On the way there Iā€™m thinking of all the possibilityā€™s that would cause the brakes to not release.

I get there build the air up no problem,jump out and walk around the truck and trailer listening for leaks,nothing significant. Back in the cab and release the park brake and I notice that the Broms brake button on the dash has popped out,push it in and the brakes release,all good.

Old mate had stopped for a while and must have slowly lost all the air,when this happens on a Volvo the Broms button,which is a Volvo safety feature will pop out and prevent the brakes from being released.

Old mate felt pretty silly,but said heā€™d not driven a Volvo before so didnā€™t know about the Broms button. I wonder how many blokes have been caught out by these.

For me easy money three hours call out for a five minute job,plus an hours drive.

I did it first time I drove an FL10, loaded in a fuel terminal and it wasnā€™t unusual to lose air while loading but a 'phone call to the foreman fitter put me in my place. Regards, Mizzo.

I recall a Brs taskforce driver dipping the dip stick on a Leyland roadtrain with the engine running :open_mouth: ,when I tried to tell the driver he got very arsey and said it was a pile of crap any how, any way I walked round the truck to assist and found all four rear tyres were either flat or below the legal thread depth, he then said sod this and drove off to hook a flat trailer up . :laughing: ,never did know if he got out the yard. :laughing:

what about you bewick you donā€™t seem to mention your fitters ?

A mate of mine rang me at about 8pm one day last week for a bit of technical. He wanted to know how to dismantle the oil filter, how many sump bungs there are, and the method of checking the oil level on an AEC 9.6 horizontal in a Regal IV bus. This is not quite as easy as it sounds and very easy to get wrong. He wasnā€™t at all happy since he had been called out to sort out the drivers ā€˜mistakeā€™ . The nozzle from the yard fuel pump had been put in the engine oil filler neck and the engine had been filled with dieselā€¦and started. Quite why the fuel tank filler neck would have a dipstick in it had clearly escaped someone.

In Southampton Docks at the P&O Normandy Ferries/Townshend Thoresen terminal, it was customary for the ā€œDockiesā€ to load any vehicle that was going ā€œunaccompaniedā€ (ā€œthatā€™s my job driver!ā€). Many twisted propshafts, broken half shafts and burnt clutches later, they were introduced to the Broms brake!

True story

Years ago a former driver of mine Paddy Keoghan worked for a Southampton company Spring Road Transport driving a Leyland Marathon. In the middle of winter the boss Ken Lane receives a call from Paddy some where in France near the Blanc I think saying he had problems he thought the clutch had gone!

Anyway a day passes and no word from Paddy and poor Ken doesnā€™t know what to do then next morning Paddy arrives in the yard! When Ken asked him about the clutch and what had happened turns out Paddy had been parked on ice!!!

Regards Pat

Well to be truthfull I cannot readily recall ANY tales of driver related errors in all my time as both a fitter and driver, we were obviously fortunate enough to have decent lads? :neutral_face:

Pete.

In my early days of transport. I worked in the garage for a while, it gave me a good grounding as to how things should work. The age old problem of drivers complaining, ā€œit wonā€™t pullā€ or ā€œit has lost power.ā€

It was easily solved, we used to drop the glass filter bowl off and swill it out, tell them to try that and 9 times out of 10 they would come back and tell me what an improvement I had made.

An old boss told one the drivers not to mess about with that red button on the gearstick as he would wear it out. He never understood why his 220.30 Iveco was so crap on fuel

Thereā€™s some goodies coming through on here,I like the one about the bloke with the clutch problem on the ice.

For some reason when I was working for Volvo we looked after the local councilā€™s mini road/pavement sweeper. It was the small type of sweeper that is driven on the pavements around bus stops and other street furniture with a large elephants trunk hoover swinging around from the roof. They would start early after the pubs kicked out from one AM on and the blokes driving it were not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Anyhow two AM an the phone goes,this cabbage on the other end says ā€˜It just wonā€™t ā– ā– ā– ā–  Bro!ā€™ ā€˜It wonā€™t goā€™

A quick trip into town and half asleep Iā€™m sat in the cab thinking whatā€™s wrong with this thing and I notice a rocker switch on the dash with a picture of a fan on it,I turn it on and the loud whirring sound starts,like a helicopter winding up and a pile of rubbish is inhaled by the elephants trunk hanging over the front.

No wonder ā€˜It wonā€™t ā– ā– ā– ā–  Broā€™ you hadnā€™t turned the f##king thing on!

Twenty minutes later Iā€™m tucked up in bed again.

Iā€™d come in from Greece and was waiting at Hangartner Verona to reload, for Britain, and was told it would be about 5 hours so I had something to eat then thought it would be a good idea to adjust the brakes and have a whiz round with the grease gun.
I was doing the middle axle on the trailer when one of our Italian drivers showed up and asked me what I was doing, so I said I was adjusting the brakes as I had been out for a couple of weeks. He thought that was a great idea and could I show him how to do it, as heā€™d had a few trailers where he though the brakes were a bit dodgy ( at this point I should of heard warning bells )
ā€œYouā€™ll need a 9/16 ring spanner and a hammer.ā€ I told him and I showed him how to do it on the rear axle. Well he was Italian and he didnā€™t have a 9/16 spanner but he had a 14 mm which was close enough and to make up the difference he had a bigger hammer.
"Take it up till its tight, then wind it back a 1/4 " he was quite impressed how easy it was and thought heā€™d give it a go.
Ten minutes later he was back telling me his brakes had seized, and it wasnā€™t possible to adjust them, so I told him to chock the wheels and let the brake of first. He was a bit embarrassed , but went away and did the job.

But wait thereā€™s moreā€¦

A couple of months later I was asked to do a trailer swap with one of the Italians at Ivrea, which is a thing I was never happy about, but told not to worry as I would get my trailer back the following week. I met the trailer at the north bound side and did the swap, there was 24 tons of steel pipe on the floor and groupage to the roof on top of that. At Aosta I did the toll booth which was the first stop and the first time I used the brakes and at the back of my mind something wasnā€™t quite right but it was Wednesday afternoon and I was meant to tip and load the trailer that week up round Liverpool and Manchester so I had to push on. The first time I had to use the brakes in anger was the descent form the top of the Blonk and it wasnā€™t pretty, by the time I reached the end of the hair pin bend bit there was no base in the seat as my bum had eaten it.
After fiddling with the air lines and making surer they were working I very slowly made my way down the road a bit farther opposite the chalets where the road is bit more level and had a look under the trailer where I saw that slack adjusters were all at different angles.
It didnā€™t take long for me to work out that my Italian mate had wound all the brake of as far as they would go. Five minutes later it was a totally different truck. And I got my trailer back the following Wednesday which had been washed, first job check the brakes.

Jeffā€¦

shirtbox2003:
we are doing o.k. here guys.what about good and lousy bosses.? must be some good tales.i give you a start. did a short stint for from Accrington,what a first class nob he washe used to have a spare truck in the compound the same as what ever he was running at the time,and all trucks had number plate,and vid plates drilled to same centres just in case one was off road or went for mot then it was a quick transplant.just one tale about . more to follow. :smiling_imp: :wink: :laughing:

More can follow, but without names please, otherwise they will be removed.
Such gossipy subjects are probably best dealt with by PMs. dd.

The best boss ever. Old Fred Chappell. Fred gave me and a few more young fellas our start, threw us in at the deep end, and I for one have been very grateful all my life. Old Fred, heā€™s long gone now but not forgotten. He used to drive a Humber Super Snipe, he kept it in new condition.