newmercman:
So you didn’t hear about the 52spd DB box developed specially for the Gardner then?
I had a 6LXC with a DB 6speed & Eaton 2 speed rear axle, it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding & was flat out at 58mph, it may well have been able to climb up the side of a house, but as my job involved driving along roads, not driving up houses, that ability was somewhat lost on me 
I hated that lorry with a passion, apart from being incredibly slow, it was noisy, unless it was pulling up a long drag in summer the heater was a total waste of time & it wasn’t particularly good on fuel as I remember, in the 50s & 60s the Gardner may have deserved it’s reputation, but every one else moved on, they didn’t. I remember an interview with one of the Gardner family saying that there would never be a need for an engine over 250hp in a lorry, I think he may have been a little bit wrong there, we now have 160hp Sprinter vans & 220hp 7.5tonners, in fact 250hp is now seen as an 18tonner engine in a fleet spec lorry!
Put it this way, a Guy with an 8LXB (if such a thing existed 
) up against a 111 Scania, Volvo F88, Daf 2800, Merc 1924/1626 or MAN 16-240, now which do you think most drivers would prefer? Obviously anything but the Guy, the people who bought the lorries would agree too, that is why you can still buy any of the competition, but you can’t buy a Guy, you can go on all you like about bad management at the Leyland Group blah blah blah, but the simple fact is a Guy was crap Even the revered Gardner was crap, it’s short sighted management team cannot be blamed for everything, the main users of its engines ERF & Atkinson (now Seddon Atkinson) stopped selling them, they continued using ■■■■■■■ though & Foden later used CAT engines & ERF had a Detroit Diesel 60 series available for a short time, so it wasn’t the whole package, it was the fact that nobody wanted a Gardner engine anymore that stopped them being offered in these chassis & the simple reason nobody wanted them is because they weren’t good enough 
And before you think Carryfast & I are related, the two stroke DD was crap too, that’s why people stopped buying them, it may have the power to pull down a house, but if you run one you won’t have a house to pull down, you’ll have sold it to pay your fuel bill
Hi newmercman,
Your observations about the lack of power in the likes of Gardner in relation to todays moters,is like comparing a Gardner or Perkins engined lorry too a Steam powered lorry. Things have moved on.In another forty years time another generation of drivers,if there are any, will be ridiculng the 500 bhp moters of these days. I have a sprinter with the 160 bhp engine that you quoted,I also have a transit with 82 bhp,at the end of the day I can still cover as many miles with the transit as with the merc. It doesn’t matter what power you have these days,with all the holdups and volume of traffic,the extra power doesn’t count for much.
Cheers Dave.
