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Oregon | Your conversation brings alive a few good memories. Screemin' Jimmies. Ya kinda lovem and hatem at the same time. Growing up, my dad never had any big trucks. In the mid seventies the volunteer fire dept, started a new station in our community. I guess used trucks were hard to come by back then. This dept. was run mostly by pretty frugal farmers on the board of directors. (nothing wrong with that) They needed more water on wheels so they set up a couple of tankers (the younger dudes now call them "tenders", sheesh) themselves, farmer style. The best truck they could find I guess (I was grade school age then) was a '63 Pete conventional that had done lots of hard time as a self loader logger. Poor old thing was shook apart and welded up, but it still went down the road pretty good. It had a WAY fueled up 8V-71 and 5 and 4 trannies, with COMPLETELY burned out mufflers and 4" stacks. In the day, the talk was how the damn Detroits (a trucker once told me you always prefaced Detroit with damn) just wouldn't lug like a Cummins...to drive a Detroit properly, you had to slam your finger in the door and then take it out on the truck the rest of the day. Well I'm here to tell you, that old 318 would hang in there forever. That truck got driven by LOTS of inexperienced drivers on the fire dept. There are a few hilly roads in the district and guys were a little afraid of the two stick and missing a shift on the hills. They'd just mash their foot clear through the firewall and hope she'd pull it! That 318 would pull HARD clear down to 1500 if it had to. I taught myself to drive it when I was old enough to volunteer and tanker driver became pretty much my appointed duty. I'm not afraid to admit that the red hot stuff was not exactly my bag, but making sure those boys had water to throw on it was an important job as well. I miss those days. My health doesn't allow me to volunteer any more, and they got rid of that truck a few years ago. What a cool sight to remember though. Dual 1/4 mile trails of blue/black smoke streaming out of both stacks, you could hear that old Pete coming for a couple of miles. In my early twenties I used to drive truck for our neighbors doing custom sweet corn picking. They had a Louisville Ford (Cummins, 13 spd) and a Chevy 90 with a miserable 6-71 and 13spd. Half the dad-gum engine was in the cab and the shifter barely made it through the floor at the back of the cab. Boy, you really felt like a truck driver, driving that thing. That thing would beller like it was really doing something...hah...you became well acquainted with the shifter...you used it a lot :) Any way, thanks for jogging my memory. There are a few good Detroits on you-tube. One is a 6V-92 going through the gears...sounds pretty sweet. | |
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Thanks to someone
