harrybarbon

Alex

I have the same brass plaque, they are rare pieces it seems. Mine was dull and near black with grime, I have done a gentle clean and now looks similar to your plaque. I tried to polish the back side a bit harder to experiment to see how bright the brass may polish to. It did not/would not come up very bright, so I think it may be the quality of the brass made at that time. I cleaned all the grime from mine and it still has the old patina look. I have thought about giving it a clear coat but decided to leave original, been 1 year now and no change in the patina, has not dulled at all.

Agreed Vlad, excellent observation, if the tyres blew but zero damage to the guard, the guard flaps and the metal frame , so maybe the rim damage cut the tyres, the driver pulled up and removed the tyres before any damage

or is it made up to get our minds thinking what could have happened!!! 

me, I'm thinking all to do with "climate change", rising temperatures, they are doing their bit to reduce CO2 emissions, therefore NATURAL VENTILATION

have a look at the facebook AHTS and the buyer has the Pete in his shed, washed up and more pictures, since my last post

The Pete looks like the Pete that was on the AHTS Facebook page recently. If yes it is a 1960 special order and 1 of the last built, it was built from factory left over parts, I think motor is 250 Cummins and 5 X 4 transmission. Facebook comments was that a deceased estate, when alive the owner wanted $40,000 and the buyer at auction said he got it for under half the $40,000 asking figure. Comment was that new owner will restore to original. Motor not running.

Mattb73lt - you guys could be in a scene of the "Expendables", better than the actors, thank you for your service and courage. My bike riding mate was 19, he did 13 months in Vietnam, he weighed 70 kilos and carried 70 kilos of gear, good health and happiness to you all

Compliments for your passion, you are deservedly excited with the red paint after all your quality preparation, then fitting parts etc, when you fit your cab onto the chassis and bolt on the polished cast alloy radiator, that will pump the heart up.

Thank you for sharing your skills and progressive pictures 👏👏👏 

is that lizard skin on the inside of door? If yes you will find how there will be little to nil tinny sound when you close the doors

👏🍾

Thank you for your pictures, wood walls and floor is good to reduce moisture/dampness and comfort to work.

Thank you for the pictures, a happy day for all to enjoy, blue sky and lots of 🐕's, sadly not for us in 2020

Me too, i have sent message to admin and no reply

Hi Brocky, I posted a photo scanned to my computer file in Aussie trucks on 18 Sept as per usual, yet some 8 days later I repeated exactly the same process to choose a file and I get an error message - unknown server error Mick's Loadstar V6 GM at Pronto Ringwood 1981.PDF code 200

Restoration Specialties in PA have the rubber bases and the inserts for the glass or plastic lens to sit on

Please can one of you guys assist me to load pictures. I was able to load a picture 10 days ago, but now I keep getting an error message

Hi Barry, please can you guide me to load pictures, I used to be able to load my pictures easily, has there been a change to the Big mack web page? Thank you Harry

Well said, clean agi's is a labour of love, my cousin is an owner driver with Holcim and 1 of his close mates has been with Boral concrete for 35 years, all the guys in their plants are very fussy with their agi's, especially continuously cleaning out left over concrete in their barrels, today the barrel metal skin is relatively thin, if left over concrete builds up, to remove it can easily become holes in the barrel skin, both these 2 guys have all the alloy tanks etc polished every 6 months. There are some smaller private owned concrete plants that have all their company owned trucks and barrels spotless, no matter the weather and there are some who don't care for their trucks' appearance.   

There are some differences between Aussie and US. We have many more than the 2 major parties as in US, that put themselves up for voting to get into parliament eg the Nationals (formerly Country party) Greens, Sex party (now renamed) which did get a seat in Victorian state parliament, Australia party, Shooters party, etc and also supposedly Independents - lone rangers.

Also our voting system has preference voting, whereby all the parties contesting the election do deals to give each other their votes, if their party does not win the majority of the votes. For example the Greens party directed it's votes to the Labour party in their respective seats, meaning if you vote for the Greens in your local seat, the greens votes add to 6% and Labour candidate gets 45%, then the greens 6% goes to the Labour candidate giving a total of 51% and the so the Labour candidate wins the seat. The Greens thereby gets no seat in parliament, but they have defeated the Liberals, or any other party contesting the seat, from winning the seat.

And a big difference but I may be wrong here, is in US each of the 51 states vote for a nominated candidate (Trump or Biden) to be the President for the next 4 years fixed, it is one or the other or some years ago 1 of 3 when Ross Perot ran for president. In Aussie we vote for a candidate of a Party in each seat, so the winning party forms govt and the party that wins the election selects the Prime Minister - usually the parliamentary party leader is the prime minster elect and is held during the election as the PM to take the leaders title. At the last Federal election, my vote was for the local candidate, I could not directly vote 1 for Scott Morrison to be the PM, whereas as I read you vote 1 Trump or 1 Biden to be President. For us it does not mean that person that becomes the PM will remain the PM until the next election. However, on the other hand, our PM has unlimited time in office if he decides to remain the PM, his party continues to win successive elections and his fellow party elected members of parliament vote him to be the PM.

As you know in recent years have had a revolving door of removing reigning PM's mainly because the Polls were bad, - Rudd was tossed out by his fellow Labour elected party parliamentarians, went onto the backbench, bid his time and then later the same Labour parliamentarians did a 180 about turn and voted him back to be PM once more. Or the PM whilst in office and before the next election, will retire and his party's parliamentary members will vote his replacement to be the new PM, but without a public election. Our States have similar voting and govt as the Federal system and regularly the State Premiers retire and hand over the batten to the chosen heirs, which must be sitting parliament members to be able to take over the Premier position, we call this sweet heart deals. 

Another factor in our voting system is that we have electoral boundaries which are being continually revised for each election, by the Electoral commission. It is a mystery how and why they keep moving the goal posts. This has resulted in seats that were say historical Liberal party held seats to become borderline and even a Labour seat, by moving the boundaries to bring a sizeable chunk of Labour voters. Hence why our former PM Howard lost his seat, his seat was altered to bring in big number of Labour voters, whereas his seat was rock solid with 65% of the votes.

Finally, by law voting is compulsory, for all 3 levels of govt, Federal, State and Local council, if not we are fined.

Our system is complicated and as we have experienced uncertain during the period 2009 to 2018, with revolving doors.

It appears from the many pictures of the concrete agis that the companies dont seem to have a keen interest to have clean trucks and agitators, is my perception fair. Compared to our concrete companies, particularly Holcim, the Swiss company, which bought the Australian operations from Cemex of Mexico after Cemex bought the original Australian owned company in USA about 10 years ago, big presence in the Sthern US states of Texas, Florida - name just now escapes me. Cemex did not want the Australian and New Zealand operations. Locally Holcim has a culture of clean trucks, and most are owner drivers with real good contracts - they make good money  

Oh I forgot to mention, the German shepherd on top of the wool bales is not a fake photo, and he jumped up from the truck cabin. When I was young, often I saw dogs riding on top of semi loads. I recall at least 2 of my dad's drivers had their dogs ride up top, one had a similar Shepherd, if the dog did not know you, you would not dare try go near the truck. Dad's drivers never let the dogs in their cab, they never fell off the loaded semi, even when tarpped, only if there was a gap in the load or a bit of trailer floor free then the dog rode in there. 

Seems like a bit of Mad Max design influence!!!

Another wool bale load - 3 high

And Nev is climbing up and down his 3 loaded trailers every day at 77 years of age, including tying 3 long horizontal ropes around stacks 1 to 3 and load binders, once it was all tied down by ropes.

It will be looooooooong time before a driverless/AI truck drives out to the sheep stations, loads the trailers and drives to the wool traders or loads the livestock and drive to the yards, stopping to check no cattle have fallen down and then getting them upright. 

He is 1 part of our real Australian heritage, the real people that built our wonderful country. I appreciate what he has worked at with passion for 60 years and continuing. All loading and unloading by hand under the outback hot sun and dust and no air conditioned road houses. There are no protective safety hand rails up on that load. On the B model with 4 bales stacked up, that is at least 16 feet up top. Originally, the bales were hessian bags (slippery) that had to be tarped if there was a chance of rain and then they went to the plastic bags, they are very slippery to load and walk over. They were old school trained truck drivers (like my dad), a 4 high load of wool bales requires skill to not tip over, especially on our gravel/dirt roads where these sheep stations are located and even our poor sealed country roads, plus coping with cross winds we have blowing across our country.

His story reminds me of my youth. After I finished school, I worked 4 months unloading heavy compressed wool bales (with steel bands to secure the compression) from railway wagons onto tray trucks, we stacked the bales 4 high and we tied 1 rope around the rear bales to pull them into the front stacks, then the driver drove to the wharf for loading into the ships. By Fri night I was cooked, no night playing, but I felt I had done something useful. We rolled the bales at an angle close to the first row and then using the hooks piggy back the bale up and over the bale under it, that's how we got 4 high stacks. The trick was mastering the steel hooks (which I still have in our shed, by chance I moved them last week) and no 1 rule to make sure they hooked into the bale, otherwise the needle points would bounce off the bale and right into a leg (balls especially), forearm or stomach. After 3 painful weeks of big blisters, the inside of my hands were like old leather shoe soles - oh, no gloves and no creams or such fancy fix ups, just nature taking care of itself. Luckily the hooks never got into me, many near misses.

Today, the bales are loaded into containers by forklift and rightly so, especially to protect from back injury. Back then, no work safety existed.

Nev's hands would be a palm reader's dream 🤣

The company I worked for, Lambrick Transport, was 1 of the oldest Melbourne carriers, it started with bullocks and wagons (destroyed by 3rd generation) had a gent who worked for them 50 years to his retirement, nearly all his work was daily round trips loading sheep skins up 8-9 foot high on his tray truck at the merchant and driving  4 miles to the wharf, unloading and back. No ropes and no tarps, just stacked by hand as he was taught at 15 years. This gent had a history, from his early driving days, he ate his homemade lunch and drank his thermos of tea by 9.30 am and at our 12 noon lunch break, every day all the team went the pub (hotel) and he drank 10 pots of beer, no food so he could get his 10 pots in, then back to work, I saw him do that for 4 months. Only once in 4 months I saw another driver buy him a meat pie which he ate, and that lunch time he could not drink his last to 2 pots. Story was that during his 50 years, he never lost 1 sheep skin from his load, no accidents and no break downs due to his driving. He was humble, never had a sick day off work and was happy just doing his job every day and going home to his family. He had 8 children, all got a good education and 1 life long marriage.  At 65 he retired, there was no union pension or superannuation then, only the government pension and a little money from his long service leave. Within 1 week of his retirement, the new driver lost a load of sheep skins.

This gent carting wool bales reminded me of that gent I met at Lambrick's many years ago, he wore his bib and braces overalls every day at work and never hurt himself doing his job.

Okay Paul and readers, I got it wrong. It was the Antonov 124 ( 4 engines ) plane that came to Australia with the Kone lifts and was at the Avalon air show. Both planes are same basic design, the 225 is approx 15 meters longer than the 124 and the 225 has twin rear tail fins, plus 6 engines. Both open front nose and back end.  And both are 175,000 kilograms/385,000 pounds empty weight. Reading the 225 info it was used to transport the Russian space shuttle same as NASA's specially built 747 to carry the US shuttle. Interesting that Russia and US had similar space shuttles. And info says that one 225 built and one not finished.