You should be more then satisfied now Rigsby I sorted that for you on Sunday just like I said I would, hope your happy with the results…
In the early 90’s I found that a lot of people would tell you a load of crap rather than telling you they didn’t know, ( actually I knew that long before the 90’s ) If you ask some folk for direction, and they don’t know, very often they’ll just tell you the first thing that comes into their head, crap if your looking for directions in a truck.
I had been told by various numpties that if you had been to Australia before, and were older than a certain age then you couldn’t get another visa. 5 minutes at the Australian embassy in Edinburgh and 57 quid lighter I had another 1 year working visa.
Wednesday of the following week I’d seen the Opera House, the Harbor Bridge, big fig trees in Hyde park and eaten to many Mc Donalds. I also bought the latest ed of Truckin Life and saw an advert for Truckcraft. According to the add they did custom and traditional truck painting. It was the best part of a 2 hour train ride to get to Penrith and an hour on the bus after that. Later on I discovered I could do the same trip on a GPZ1100 in about 40 minutes.
First up was a bit of self promotional work
Then the jobs started coming it…
Trailer as well…
Back doors…
One of the stipulations of the visa was that I couldn’t continuously work for the same company for any more than 6 weeks at a time, so most weekends I would drive this K1 for Barry Fell, either Melbourne or Brisbane. Barry’s the guy with the ■■■…the guy with the white hair’s his dad
“late 90’s early 2000’s at the latest did it have a Mack or Renault motor in it?”
As I said, I’m no expert but when I dug around on flickr it looked like an early 90s motor. Whatever was in it was a 6 not a V8, could have been an ISX for all I know (/joke).
The design on the back door was taken from as tattoo the O/D had on his arm, the ribbon had Good Luck written on it. It was hard not to laugh when the guy showed it to me. It was my idea to work the road and sunset into the design I’m still quite happy with the result.I think the company was called Post Load Transport.
close up of the curtain.
I was a bit peed of with this. I worked about 14 hours straight on the mono tone horses, it just gone 11 o’clock at night when I chucked it in and went home with the intention of coming back the following morning and fine tuning the detail and sorting out the face tone in daylight. When I arrived at 8 the next morning the early shift had started at 6 am and done the final clear coat and the oven was going flat out.
It didn’t really matter as the guy laid it on it’s side a few months later.
I believe it was the first fully airbrushed truck in Australia.
I was looking through some of the Utube links and came across a driver reversing a double road train and someone posted a comment about using locking pins. In all the time I’ve been at this game I’ve never seen an kind of pin that locks a 5th wheel or dolly in place. I can’t see how it would be practical give the sheer forces that would be involved in keeping that sort of weight in a straight line. If there was any kind of wear or misalignment then it would just reverse round the corner, so how would that help.
Hello Jeff
Congratulations on that airbrush job on the tautliner those horses are so lifelike that is one hell of a gift you have there, A man of many talents is the only way to describe you. Eddie.
Thanks for your sentiment Eddie, happy you liked it; one of the problems in doing commercial jobs is to get things done on an unreasonable time scale. If I remember right I told the boss that I would need about 60 to 70 hours to do both curtains. In the end I got 45 for the curtains and had to do the back doors Saturday evening and Sunday morning (straight through 14 hours ) so a lot of the detail that would have change it from good to spectacular just went out the window.
I would rather have been driving Barrys Kenworth at the weekend than painting, as I got enough of that during the week.
The customer was happy and we got a lot of other work out of it’s short existence.
Locking pins are common on tipping dog trailer setups, never heard of their use on the dollies of road trains.
Typical long tipping trailer drawbar and a lock pin makes them back like a wide spread.
It’s yet another air line for the lock pin booster so it’s designed for dedicated setups, not swap-and-go road train dollies.
However ask any tipping dog driver if he uses the lock pin and I’ll bet he’ll say no.
Who want’s to admit that he can’t reverse his dog. (I know I can’t)
2 things I haven’t done and am not interested in are Tippers,Tankers. I could also add bus. SO there you that’s why I haven’t heard of locking pins. BTW dogs, supper dogs, or as they are known in the UK draw bars, and B Doubles …No problem forward or reverse…
cargo:
Locking pins are common on tipping dog trailer setups, never heard of their use on the dollies of road trains.
Typical long tipping trailer drawbar and a lock pin makes them back like a wide spread.
It’s yet another air line for the lock pin booster so it’s designed for dedicated setups, not swap-and-go road train dollies.
However ask any tipping dog driver if he uses the lock pin and I’ll bet he’ll say no.
Who want’s to admit that he can’t reverse his dog. (I know I can’t)
yup ,thats what they use over here as well.pin drops down from front o the trailer ontae the dolly ,only noticed it one day when one reversed next to me to load in a real rough quarry…aye the driver said he never uses it …aye right!
this was a real skittery buggy to reverse…the usual old hand used the pin a few times and i didnae blame him ,it was a nightmare with the btrain, loads of holes and camber at the dump out area.
I suppose it would be the same scenario as reversing a frame draw bars some guys used to drop it and push it in with the towing pin, I never did, always from the back
As with most things practise makes perfect.
Brother-in-law had an 8-wheeler plus dog on double 20’ container work. He’d back that thing anywhere into the most dreadful docks.
It was a trick setup with a turntable on the truck as well. He could remove the back container beam (off the truck) and then she was all set for a 40’ container on his tri-axle skel.
Always took a bit getting used to reversing the skel compared to the dog.
That dog trailer looks like it would come round pretty quick. I notice a few of that sort of combinations getting about on Canadian TV programs. They weren’t so popular when I was over there in 90/91. The Dutch run similar set ups.
the Gypsum quarry pictured was good for reversing as it was hardpacked but at the railhead it was another matter wi all the brickbats rolling about .
aye i would say ive noticed more o the wee dogs behind semi trailors recently,for a while it was rigids pulling quads…B trains /super Bs with a side tip on front seem to still be king.
jimmy sorry for taking the post a wee bit of course…
I kept telling them I could do more than horses but they just didn’t listen.
The main stay of Truck Craft was getting trade ins and restoring them for re sale. All the mechanical work had been done previous to to them arriving
This was usually the kind of thing we got
After a couple of weeks…
I felt bad for the guy that owned this Western Star as it was a ■■■■■■ back. When it arrived I had the job of stripping it out and when I removed the interior panels I found loads of vials with traces of blood in them. This was a common thing in the industry at the time as drivers would try and drive extremely long hours by shooting up speed.
Before
After
Ace and Phil the boss giving it the one over before taking it back to the dealer. If I remember it sold within 2 hours.
We got this 1911 chain drive Mack to restore for a customer.
The chain was quite substantial and wen we took the joining link out to take the chain of it hit the floor so hard it took a big chunk of concrete out of it.
The truck had been working in a bush logging mill and had seen a hard life, even though it looked fair in primer there wasn’t a straight bit to it and there was plenty of rust in it as well. The panel beater couldn’t do anything with it as the steel was about 2 mm thick. Without the customer knowing we cut the old cab up into panels and used that to as a template to make a new one made a new one. Much better, quicker as well.
Ace and Phil lowering the new into place
It probably would have gone faster it I was helping and not taking photos
Mock up to see if everything fits.
Strip it all down and paint it.
Get it all back together with out scratching it.
All done, happy customer, also had a load of other big toys.
Good stuff there Oily I don’t fancy that Atki with the twin trailers, I think it would work well on the Wouldn’t pull the skin of a rice pudding thread.
