harrybarbon

👏🍾

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.

Hi Paul, thanks for the comment re Crown Casino, that was around 1994/95 when I was working with a company that was the back up premix concrete supplier to the builder of Crown Casino. A friend worked for the builder doing the concrete, often 12-14 hour days, at least weekly they started a 150-200 cubic metre pour at 4 pm and they got off the finished concrete at 9 pm and then back on the job at 7 am.

So based on your recollection, the Antonov flew into Syd around 95/96, Kone would have supplied the escalators in addition to the lifts - there are many long escalators in the casino. The Antonov would have been perfect to load the escalators into the plane.

David, I enjoyed walking thru the 225 Antonov some 16-18 years ago when it was at the Avalon, Victoria Australia air show, including climbing the stairs to the flight deck, it was massive, it was lowered to minimum ground clearance and the front and rear were open, there was a very long que of people to see the Antonov, we entered from the back and out the front - 1,000's attend these shows to see, walk into and thru some magnificent aircraft and watch some real flying, including 1 jet plane similar top wing design do the 360 rollover.

I have some recollection that the Antonov did a take off, went around for a low fly thru along the main Avalon runway and then went around the bay and came in for a landing.

Also many years ago, the Antonov flew into Melbourne Tullamarine airport, my mate was a refueling supervisor, he did the refueling of the Antonov. He had the joy of a guided tour of the entire Antonov by the engineer.

I have read an article and saw a youtube video of an incomplete Antonov in the hanger in Ukraine. Is this true and correct? Article noted that if the funding could be secured to complete the Antonov, then it would go ahead.    

Hello Matt - how is your B73 restoration progressing?

About 10 years ago we had I recall E10 petrol fuel (gasoline) over here which had some bio additive, not sure, it was strongly promoted as the way to for our petrol motors. So I started using it in our Toyota Prado 4 litre V6. Some 6 months later motor would not start, the engine sounded like it was choking. I rang the service manager at our local Toyota yard. First question - what fuel are you using, I said E10. His reply was - never use it again, put in 10-20 litres of 98 fuel and a bottle of injector additive and try kicking over the engine without actually starting the motor 3-4 times and then try start it, let it run for 1/2 hour stationary. It fired up after 3 key turns, the motor was rough for about 30 minutes and slowly it began to settle down.

The service manager said the E10 slowly builds up like a glue and blocks the injectors and fuel pump, just keep topping up with 98 and add 1 bottle of fuel additive/cleaner weekly for next 3 weeks to clean out the crap. And continue using 98 fuel, which I have and thereafter motor has run perfectly, and more power and better fuel range than 95 and 92. 

We have hydrogen mixing with the diesel fuel in our E6 - 350, runs like a Swiss watch and reduces emissions 75-80%, plus the increased torque, up to 25% and clean engine. We planned to add LPG, but rules and regs to hard and the Mack technical guys told me their experience during early 1980's in new Ultraliners LPG was causing burn't valves and pistons, hence they removed the LPG set ups. No problems with the hydrogen and cheap to buy or make distilled water. One litre of distilled water creates hydrogen for 1,000 klms.

Passion equals success  👍

we have the same inter-cooler on our E6-350, definitely a second air cleaner (dry element unit) to match the right side air cleaner, which should also be a dry element unit with your EM6 - 300 engine, it will pull real good  

Good observation and yes seems to be a novel way to make it work, i was told by owner that it ran excellently. The air intake is pumping air in and the turbo is allowing the exhaust to release the blow out, so a new way of application that works.

Here is a pic of new Shell Macks with the same exhaust muffler.

Pic of blue frame 10/89 Valueliner with the steering box mounted inside the frame/chassis, the red frame Valueliner build was 12/89 it had the steering box mounted on outside of the frame, seems that Mack Aust decided soon after Oct 89 to mount the steering box outside the frame. 

All Superliners that I have seen do not have the V8 emblem, however all the Valueliners with the V8 engine have the V8 emblem. Maybe only the early V8 Superliners had the V8 emblem. The blue Superliner seems to have lost all it's hood emblems many moons past!!! Holes all filled in.

No air start in Bromage's Superliner and the muffler would have been speced to comply with our fuel delivery trucks regs. During 1970's to 1980's Shell had all Macks for it's prime movers and all had same type of muffler.

Previously, the mufflers were under the front bumper and pointing out to the right side, again for govt regs,  because most fuel trucks were petrol engines.