harry_gill:
hiya,
Well Marky i don’t “row” but all i’ve seen up to now are front end shots of motors which are being proclaimed to be Big Js having the 8XLB engine without any proof whatsoever that these motors exist as for keeping so called motivating thought’s to myself why should I ■■, ever heard of free speech i’m only voiceing my opinion, as are you, i’m not saying anything other than i haven’t seen anything that proves to me that these motors exist and find it is strange that such a rare motor wasn’t catalagued and shown in the trade publications not one person has come forward with anything other than they have “driven one” now Marky is that looking for a row ■■, surely there’s one of Guy’s workforce still around a test driver perhaps or surely a salesman who can prove once and for all that these motors was manufactured in-house if they was produced and sold there must be bills of sale still in existence.
thanks harry long retired.
Without wishing to sound rude Harry, do you have any inkling of how disrespectful you sound? I didn’t say you were rowing, I intimated to you perhaps wanting to start one.
Dave has gone to ridiculous lengths to keep in touch with a former owner of one of these motors to satisfy the original enquiry. As time has gone by, people who worked on & drove these wagons have joined the discussion with anecdotal evidence which satisfies everyone apart from you. Well, there’s also Dennis, but I suspect his wooden spoon must be getting re-grooved at present - he’s stirred this pot quite well over recent months without actually causing any grief 
You say you’ve got a mate who is adamant Guy Motors never built any Big J4Ts with 8LXB engines. Well, why would Smith’s of Maddiston end up with 30-odd of them? The balance of probability tells anyone with a whiff of pragmatism that a company of that size, with workshops as busy as they would’ve been at that time (in terms of servicing & repairs alone) wouldn’t have even considered buying new motors then stripping them down to rebuild them again. What sort of warranty would the wagons have? In terms of lost revenue alone, how much money would they have wasted stripping, modifying and rebuilding 30-odd motors while these things were in bits on the workshop floor?
Regardless of that, what about the prospect of having to go to Gardners @ Patricroft and start competing with the likes of ERF, Atkinson, Foden and all the others for engines which were already in constraint for months at a time? Don’t forget, in order to get the engines, Smiths would’ve had to start bartering with Gardner months, maybe years ahead, in order to get the engines when they needed them. Either that, or have brand new Guy tractors sat in a yard or a shed, waiting for Gardner to deliver the engines. Either way, someone would’ve seen either the wagons in bits or sat idle, waiting to be pulled to bits. The people from Smiths on here from that era have all come forward and said they either drove or maintained them as complete motors from new, so that sort of blows your theory into the dirt - whether your mate is adamant or not.
If my post sounds unkind, it isn’t meant to. All I’m doing is applying some reasoned logic to the evidence we’ve had to date. A picture of the back two cylinders sticking out of a Motor Panels cab is looking likely to be as rare as [zb] from China - far fetched and almost certainly unattainable; possibly why Dennis is asking for one Guys at that time weren’t the equivelent of today’s show ponies; they were gaffers motors which didn’t attract any focussed attention - which is why the one shot Dennis is looking for will probably never surface. In fact, to add more reasoned logic - perhaps the only person keen to take such a picture would’ve been the fleet engineer who did the aftermarket ‘shoe-horning’. Maybe the reason that no such pictures have surfaced is because no such exercise ever happened? We can only sit and wonder…
Well done to Dave for all his efforts, and thanks to everyone else who has contributed facts and recollections from their memories of the 8LXB Big J4Ts. I wouldn’t mind, but I swore black was white that they never existed when all this started - but I’m so glad I kept reading this thread and I’m happy I’ve been proved wrong.
