Thanks for you sentiment Anorak… If you are going to use a media blaster of any kind try to do so in a confined area, as that stuff gets all over the place. Use it on a cement floor if possible, and when you have ran out of media, just sweep it up along with all the dust and rust particles and bung it in the pot again. As long as it stays dry you can keep going and use it over and over until it’s just powder, and not really doing anything.
When I was in Britain I used to use stuff called J blast which I got in 25kg bags from the local auto paint shop. There used to be a big catalogue company I think it was Tool Market, they used a lot of red in their advertising, they sold sand blasters and j blast as well. 2 bags of that stuff used a few times was enough to do a 6 leg tipper chassis. A sand blaster is just a blaster, you can put anything in it, rough sand will move stuff quicker than coco or almond husks, but nut husks will be kinder than sand.
If you really want to get into it then get a water blaster, the sand still does the abrasive bit, but the water contains the media from spraying about.
Most of the early KW"s that Friderici had were flat top k 100’s, only later on did they have a few Aerodynes and most of them were on Heavy Haulage. Like you En- Tour-Age I don’t know why they would order a KW with a Cat or Detriot, perhaps they didn’t have the experience and hind sight we now have. I find the Cat to have a very limited useful rev range, and exhaust brake is not much more than an annoying noise. The Detroit is low on torque compared to the other offerings at the time. Perhaps the sales team was a bit persuasive, and needed to make sales in certain areas…I wasn’t there at the time so I can’t really comment…
One thing I would like to add is that a Kenworth is set up to pull American trailers which have the pin set at about 4 and a bit feet from the front of the trailer. Australian trailers are set the same way, and the rear bogies are nearly at the rear of the trailer which puts the weight very central in the vehicle with no see sawing at all. The ride on this kind of set up isn’t really that rough and the engineers at the factory have the set up fairly spot on for the application it was designed for.
If you hook up a Kenworth to a European trailer with a deep pin and more central bogie location then this throws the whole dynamic right out the window, and the whole thing goes down the road like a pork chop ( that’s Australian for not behaving very well ) I’ve also notice that if you stick a European tractor under a rear bogie Australian trailer than it also handles like a bag of crap.
If you have a look at the trailers that Friderici had ie the step frame tilts , they were very close to an American trailer for pin a bogie set up. Pin all the way at the front and bogie close to the rear.
Don’t put an American truck under a European trailer than tell me it’s rubbish, because it wasn’t designed for that operation, it would be like telling me that even though you marinated the chair leg in mango and soy overnight, it still was rather tough and didn’t have the flavour of that nice duck you had the night before…
Jeff…
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