DEANB:
JAKEY:
Hello Mark , Nice to hear from you, our young lads will pack the vans but we prefer the driver too,but when needed they will just get on.
Only job I got coming back from France is in June ,I got to find a load going out though !!!
I got problems with the new truck !!!
Whats wrong with the new truck JAKEY ?
Nice old Guy.
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We ran three Guy Otters like that. Two 1964 B reg 7 1 1965 C reg. They were built like battleships. and totally reliable apart from the cab which was fibreglass but built onto a metal frame that rusted and collapsed. There was an interesting article on one of these threads that explained the design flaw that caused the problem.
I am not mechanically minded but remember one afternoon when everyone else apart from office staff were out and I was instructed that one of the Guys that was over the pit needed a new clutch plate, so I had to take out every bolt I could see round the gearbox area to prepare for taking out the gearbox There were hundreds.
The big problem was the 4 cylinder Gardiner engine was underpowered when the speed limit was raised and Motorways became more common.They would only do 45 mph which when designed was all that was needed, but time goes on and everything passed you.
We stripped each cab down & rebuilt to sort out the cab problem but the crunch came latish one night about 7 PM a Bedford SB returning home had run out of fuel on Park Head bank (between Spennymoor & Bishop Auckland) and dad told me to find a rope and the easiest van to get out was one of the Guys. Although I had driven all of them my father had never been in the cab of one before, so off we go getting in front of the Bedford with the rope attached starting up the Guy it just wouldn’t move, so back & get another Bedford SB that was in and it pulled it home like nothing was behind. At that point Dad decided the Guys must go so we got 3 Bedford KE’s with 330 cu in engines & transferred the bodies onto them & the Guys were sold for scrap, which was sad but no good for the 1970s. However they got 24 mpg & the Bedfords that replaced them got 12 MPG. Such a shame they hadn’t put Gardner’s 5 cylinder engine in