This is an ultraliner 350hp, 12 speed. It has a reco motor and gearbox with less than 50,000ks on the clock. We did the motor up 2 years ago despite the fact that the old motor was still running well but using a little oil having done well over a million ks. Like the R Model below this truck is an ex tanker truck. It's very light in the steering and has an air over hydraulic clutch which makes the clutch as light as a feather and difficult to get use to after driving a mack without such luxuries.
We call this truck OJ. A mate of mine owned in for many years and for most of that time it had one driver Kevin Nathan who featured in the TV show NZ Giants. One Friday it finally left the steel yard replaced by a new CH Mack. The staff in the yard thought that was the last they would see of it until I drove back in either the same day or a day or 2 later.
ReplyDeleteThe motor was tired then but just kept going, it was painted gun metal grey and had the name 'The Dealer' as my mate was a scrap metal dealer. Being a cab over it is a quiet truck to drive and climbing in and out of it kept me fit.
One day I was turning right onto Roscommon Road at the lights and got clipped by a truck speeding through the red. I don't recall if I was knocked out but I recall wondering why the truck wasn't moving, it had gone from a half right turn to a half left. When I worked out we'd been hit (my young brotherinlaw was my off-sider) I shut the motor down and climbed down from the cab unaware that I had a head injury, broken ribs and a pierced lung. A doctor had stopped and said that he'd already rung for an ambulance, he wanted me to sit in his car and wait but I told him I didn't want to do that because I was bleeding.
I wasn't too many days in hospital but within hours my wife arrived with the 2 oldest who very young then and it must have been a big shock for them. I was a long time healing from that because when the injuries began to heal it was evident that I also had a moderately severe neck injury.
It took about 5 years to settle the insurance case. Within a few days of getting out of hospital I made an offer to the other party's insurers as to a settlement amount. They rejected it and around 5 years later they settled for three times that amount and had to absorb costs that were roughly 10 times what I'd suggested as the original settlement figure.
The repairers did a pretty crappy repair on the truck, totally missing a bent chassis. Finally, Truck Smash Repairs in Onehunga determined what was wrong and fixed over a couple of days. As I've written above we overhauled the engine a couple of years back although the original I'm sure would have kept going. It's swapped to electric start and has 12 speed box. I've often taken a break by jumping in the sleeper box and pulling the curtains for half an hour. So you see the first 2 Macks here are a little like me, knocked around but still willing.
Overlooked to mention that when OJ was in the first panel shop the batteries started to fail from sitting around too long, had probably sulphated if not collapsed in the accident. Even though the truck then had an air start current was needed to pull the air solenoid in. I offered to get new batteries but the foreman said no he'd charge the old ones up. Sometime later I was driving past the panel shop and there was a police cordon blocking it. I stopped and went in to find that the foreman had been pinned to the wall by the truck, had his sternum crushed and had been rushed to hospital in a serious condition. OSH got involved and one of the inspectors tried to blame us for the accident. The problem was that the mechanic they got to assess the truck was from the company that regularly serviced it and therefore wasn't in a position to offer a critical opinion on work that had been done in his own workshop.
ReplyDeleteAs it prevailed the accident wasn't caused by poor maintainence or lack of, rather the foreman had taken to leaving the truck parked with the wheel on right hand lock so that he go in beside the wheel could trip the air solenoid on the chassis manually if the battery was flat. Unfortunately, he broke a golden rule and left the truck in gear. When he tripped the air the truck started and drove him into the wall. Fortunately he recovered fully but there were rumblings about the truck being a version of the car in the movie 'Christine' I think it was - all because of a driver speeding through a red light on Rosscommon Road. He was fined a few hundred dollars for dangerous driving causing injury although he attempted to deny running the red light but plenty of others saw the accident.