Maxidyne

Looking at Ford's balance sheet and doing a little updating... After adding $15B in debt and figuring in the devaluation of vehicles in inventory, Ford is near bankrupt. At least on paper.

I take the politician's pontifications with a heap o' salt, but I pay attention to the scientists. They tell us that this is a flu on steroids with at least ten times the normal lethality. We have no vaccines for it and it's spreading at a logarithmic rate. And if you don't want those unprepared young folks taking over our world, remember that we old folks are the most likely to die, especially if we're smokers. So if you don't want these young people digging through your shop, throwing all your treasures, and burying you alone to maintain social distancing, take precautions and maintain social distancing now!

I've noticed they're offering more heavy frames and axles on the Cascadia, so Daimler probably wants to standardize on that cab.

The oil sector companies I'm seeing at bargain prices tend to be the smaller and mid sized ones that are suppliers and subbies to the big oil companies= Very real risk they go under and get gobbled up at bargain prices.

Good point- One of the reasons Mack once had more market share than Volvo and Mack now have combined is that they realized selling a "half Mack" was better than no sale at all. For example, oilfield service companies and wholesale bakers bought Macks with 2 stroke Detroits because they were already set up to service Detroits. Offering Cummins, Eaton, etc. will also appeal to operators in my area- the regional center near me has International and Freightliner dealers who service Cummins, etc. but is 90 miles from the nearest Mack or Volvo dealership!

I've been buying up some stocks at bargain prices the last few days, but I'm staying away from oil. While the prices are tempting, there is still way too much capacity out there- I doubt electric cars will take much market share, but the increased efficiency of conventional vehicles will produce a surplus of oil until the easy to access oil is gone and more fracking is necessary.

Europe gets a whole new cab, we get some LED parking lights...

Cold start up=high oil pressure. Could have blown out an oil filter, etc. and caused the low oil pressure, could be something more expensive than the truck is worth. But if worse comes to worse, it may be worth the asking price in parts.

I like the front 3 point, would come in handy here!

Will we even see the new cab here? IIRC Volvo is still giving us north americans a conventional version of the cabovers from the mid 90s with a new hood. Thus it looks like this is probably the second update we'll miss. Not that we'll miss much- the 80s vintage Mack conventional cab is still a better design!

But even back in the 1980s when I first saw the MH I could see it'd spent some time in the wind tunnel- It was obvious that Mack "sweated the small stuff" in details like sealing off the gap between where the cab tilted away from the fixed bodywork so rouge air couldn't sneak through there. Compare most any Mack highway truck with it's contemporary competitors and Mack most always had the best aerodynamics.

Was this converted from a straight truck or originally built as a tractor? Looks like it has the front bumper pushed forward and a pump or something on the front.

Would cost about $10B to buy Traton if VW Group would sell. Ford's stock value is about $30B now and would likely go up if VW made an offer= Ain't gonna happen.

Hopefully Ford will stick with the aluminum body, makes a world of difference here in the rust belt. As for IRS, one benefit would be that they could lower the bed a couple inches. Not that anybody ever hauls anything with pickups...

One has to question the wisdom of Ford's tooling up and bringing to market not one but two Broncos to challenge Jeep's supremacy in the hard core 4WD market... Is that market big enough to support more high volume products?

Kevin probably knows way more about the wet clutch era than I do, but IIRC the Spicer wet clutch was offered as an option by Mack and GMC around the late 60s into the 70s and seemed to have mostly been installed in UPS tractors. By the time I became a peak season UPS feeder driver in the 90s they'd all been converted to dry clutches.

The Cat 3116 and 3126 were torqueless wonders. The Postal Service bought out a contract from one of CF's divisions and with it got a fleet of M2 Freightliner tractors with 3126s and 6 speeds, even pulling empty trailers they were slow. I drove a Penske rental Freightliner business class tractor with a 3126 and an RT1160 a few times, it was still a torque less wonder but at least you could keep it in the power band. Was kinda fun to drive too- the smallish engine changed RPMs quickly and the unsycronized Roadranger shifted a lot quicker than the synchronized 6 speed. But why mess with a decades old 9513 when the newer Roadrangers with all their improvements will just as easily bolt up?

Agreed, VW has some crappy dealers, but used to be that I seldom needed them. My 1979 only went back to a dealer once, good old school union shop that rebuilt the whole front end after it was hit while parked. The 1986 went back to the same dealer once for a timing belt check, old mechanic told me it looked like new and don't worry about it. The 2003 didn't go back to the dealer until it was 11 years old for warrantied rust repairs, service writer was amazed that it wasn't even in VW's database. The 2013 was another story, VW threw in the first 3 services and the Naples, Florida dealer maybe did the oil change. Got the tools and did the 40k miles DSG transmission fluid change myself, but was wearing tires like crazy so had to get an alignment in Florida. The Fort Meyers dealer proved just as incompetent as the Naples one, they managed to damage a camber adjusting eccentric bolt and then gave me a near thousand $$$ estimate to fix their mistake. Local indie shop fixed it for $100 and VW gave all us TDI owners an offer we couldn't refuse to buy the car back. Replaced with a 2015 TDI that at 36k miles has already been back to the dealer twice for warranty repair and sucking out some of the oil they overfilled.

Even more so as truck sales drop, the integrated truck makers are promoting their own engines to try to keep more of the diminishing revenue in house. And while Cummins and Daimler with around 100,000 sales a year in this market are probably turning a profit, is International really making any money building just 10,000 engines a year for North America? How about Paccar and Volvo?

For a start, Mack made more B models than F models. Here in the rust belt B models had pretty much disappeared from the highways by the mid 70s when the newest were 10 years old. The last F models were built around 1982, and when I first tempted for peak season at UPS in 1992 they still had several F models in service. In fact, I didn't get to drive them much because the senior drivers preferred them to the GMC Astros and only the incoming MH and later CH models would pry the senior drivers out of their beloved F models. So the B models lasted about a decade in highway service and a few lasted longer in lower mileage vocational applications. The F models lasted over a decade and rusted out rather than wore out- Rumor has it that Hostess was still running a late 60s F model Western in Texas into the late 80s at least. The difference in survival rates are not because the F model was an inferior truck, the B model has a higher survival rate because many of them saw lower mileages in vocational service and a lot of collectiors liked the good looks of the B model and preserved them, while an F model was just an old truck that had done it's job and was scrapped when it could no longer worked.

Looks like double 13.6 meter trailers, resulting in some impressive productivity. Would be interesting to see how that combination would work here in Minnesota where we have similar climate to Finland. It's generally thought that long doubles have to be restricted to turnpikes because they cut in too much on corners, but with those longer overhangs on the front and rear of the trailers the resulting shorter wheelbase might make the cut in on corners acceptable.

Daimler dropped the Argosy glider about a year ago, but there might be some unbuilt ones laying about. Hostess had a lot of Argosies with 60 series and they sold cheap after the bankruptcy. Local Freighliner dealer had some 2015 or so Argosy gliders with 60 series IIRC that were set up with droms for boat hauling, but they wanted crazy $$$ for them.

F model production ended around 1982. International, KW and Pete sold cabovers here through around 2003 and Freightliner through 2006. The KW cabover is still in production in Australia and Daimler is just now winding down production of the Argosy for export markets.

Back in the 70s the two best selling heavy trucks were the Freightliner and International cabovers. Then the feds eliminated overall length limits and the new truck market shifted to conventionals. Same thing happened in the used truck market, cabovers had such low resale value that a lot were simply scrapped or glidered into conventionals. UPS of course cut up their F models when they retired them, rust took care of most of the rest, and when aluminum prices went up most of the aluminum cabovers got melted down.

Very popular truck, but that was four decades ago and like the other trucks of that age, not many survive.