newmercman:
Carryfast I know you have a two stroke Detroit fetish, but you got to admit a Gardner made a lovely noise too, especially the 8 pot & they could match any two stroke for smoke on a cold morning
As a piece of engineering a Gardner engine was about as good as it gets, just a shame the management team were so short sighted, who knows? If they had devoted the same degree of engineering to their turbo charged engines as they did the 4L, 5L, 6L & 8L series of engines, things would’ve been very different in the truck world today.
In their day, they were top dog on operating economics, unless speed at the expense of fuel consumption and maintenance cost was your overriding operational requirement. Of course, you can gear it to go at whatever speed you want. And as for hills, “Carryfast”, I remember being comprehensively left behind by a Killingbeck 8-cylinder Atkinson. It was across the moors of Lancashire, and I was driving a bobtail Volvo F12, weighing several tons less than his double-drive tractor and empty trailer.
Gardner were slow in upping the power, it is true, and developing the 6LXB into the 6LXC to meet the requirement for 6 bhp/ton at 32 tons was risibly late. Beyond that, and into the turbocharging era, they had ceased to be the masters of their own destiny, and investment by Hawker Siddeley was not sufficient to put them back at the top of the game. Perhaps that’s why the 6LYT ended up as the Triumph Stag of the commercial vehicle world? Top of the tree… till it broke!