Exchanging views with Victor, who used to deliver diesel to us, while he worked for Phillips Petroleum in the early seventies reminded me of the events that stopped us using Phillips diesel.
Around this time of year about 1972 or 3 we must have enjoyed a spell of hot weather. On the A! Scotch Corner roundabout had been bypassed and over about a three week period we had about 10 or 12 Bedford TKs with both the 330 cu in engine and the 466 engine suffer the same fate of dropping a valve and which in some cases simply bent, but in other cases damaged the top of the piston and as Bedford weren’t at that time using sleaves, just bored blocks, damaging the bore.
It caused us serious problems on all fronts that we had serious work flow problems, workshop problems which also added up to possible cash flow problems.
As I have said in a few cases we were lucky in just fitting a new valve and in others valve and piston, but sometimes the bore was damaged causing us to have to ‘clean out the bore’ or in quite a few other cases fit a new short motor.
We wondered what had caused it and one trail of thought was now as they were no longer having to change down to go round Scotch Corner roundabout they were keeping the vehicles going in 5th gear and the Bedfords weren’t getting that extra cooling the fan would give them when they changed down. We told all drivers to make sure they changed down into 4th as they went up the gradual gradient of the new carriageway. The old SBs with the 330 engine weren’t affected but the airflow into them with the radiator on the front was more direct.
We were using Phillips Diesel and Castrol Oil. Castrol was the most expensive oil and to me it always seemed stupid spending extra on their products. However years before my grandfather had had good results from Castrol and we had traditionally used it, and it always prompted arguments when I said we should use cheaper engine oil.
We approached Phillips and Castrol to see if either could test their products to see if they could assist us with answers. Phillips took away for testing a bent valve and a new valve and a damaged piston. Castrol’s reply was simply ‘There is nothing wrong with our oil. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time and in our view Castrol was no exception so with their direct approach gave me and my father reason to discontinue using their oil, overruling any arguments from my grandfather.
Phillips on the other hand never came back with the results from their tests, never bringing back the piston and valves. We saw silence as a sign of guilt and changed the diesel suppliers as well, as an explanation had been given to us by Bedford that if the diesel we used had excess sulphur it could cause a build up of carbon at the top of the valve and that could be causing our problems.
It also changed our confidence in Bedfords, with us having vans built on the more expensive Seddon Pennine coach chassis, using AEC and Leyland on tractor units.
We never had a recurrence of the problems and eventually found out that Bedfords weren’t that bad for our usage after all. With the exception that we always got poor results from TK and TM tractor units. Our problem was that we never carried heavy loads and it seemed such a waste buying 32 ton tractor units, but had we bought ERF or Atkinson with Gardner engines we would have been a lot more profitable with our artics enjoying much more reliability and better fuel consumption, which we discovered when we started running ERFs with Gardner engines.
