Lyndsay Whittle follows up on last month’s Lou Ozich article with a profile on long-time Auckland-based contractor Joe Tuffs
While carrying out some research for my article on the late Lou Ozich in last month’s issue of Deals on Wheels, his family told me that his two WABCO motor scrapers and his CAT D6 were sold to Joe Tuffs in the late 1980s. I recall thinking at the time it’d be a bit of a stretch to track down a man who was old enough to have purchased a business almost forty years ago.
The story was completed and ready to be sent to the Ed when a glimmer of hope was presented that this mysterious man Joe Tuffs might just be contactable, if I could only find the time to track him down.
A last-minute call to Bob Yelavich of Yelavich Transport fame, who is now in his 90s and still works in the business, was holding the trump card I needed and promptly put me in contact with a colleague Malcolm Gates, who said that Joe was alive and well and was still operating WABCOs for Dempsey Wood Civil Ltd.
After a phone call to Dempsey Wood, Joe made contact and immediately agreed to be interviewed, however it was too late at that stage for any content to be included in the Lou Ozich story.
This presented us with an opportunity to do a standalone article on Joe’s illustrious career, which I think they call a positive version of the law of unintended consequences.
Joe Tuffs is a spritely 76year-old who still regularly puts in a 10-hour day, eight days a week (sorry, that’s a Beatles song), I mean five days a week and a ‘short’ stint of eight hours on a Saturday for six months of the year.
WABCO loyalty
Joe’s a WABCO man through and through, a bug he says he caught from Lou Ozich when he worked for Lou for 13 years from 1973 to 1986, after which he purchased Lou’s entire operation.
Joe recounts how he’d just left the army in the early 1970s and was trawling through the situation’s vacant column of the local newspaper when he spotted an advert for a machine operator.
Upon presenting himself before his potential new employer who was some 20 years his senior, Joe was asked if he could ‘take orders’. No other questions were asked, such as ‘can you operate a machine?’ The only criterion it seemed was that the applicant could ‘take orders’.
Well, that was kind of like asking the Pope if he was a Catholic, as Joe replied, “of course I can, I’ve just come out of the army.”
“You’ve got the job,” said Lou. “You can start tomorrow”.
Joe says that while Lou was a hard man, he was also fair and always prepared to put time into teaching his staff members every aspect of the earthmoving game, including how to fix what was broken.
He recalls a time when Lou set him to work welding broken track rollers when it would have been cheaper for the old bugger to buy new ones. While the practice of welding broken track rollers might seem strange by 2024 standards, Joe admits that the skills he gained under Lou’s tutelage have well and truly held him in good stead over the years.
He even goes so far to say that Lou taught him everything he knows about the earthmoving business.
One era ends
Lou announced his intention to retire, completely out of the blue in 1986 at the relatively young age of 59. Not even his family, nor his loyal friend and employee Joe Tuffs, can tell us why he decided to retire from a business he loved at such a young age.
Whatever the reason, the decision served him well, as he lived another 38 years in happy retirement, hunting and fishing, along with building and flying light aircraft.
Another era dawns
Joe Tuffs was quick to pick up from where Lou Ozich exited and purchased Lou’s two 160 horsepower WABCO 111A motor scrapers (a lot of ‘grunt’ back in the day), a CAT D6 and scoop, along with a tamper.
Joe says he was always prepared to put in the hours and combined with his ability to carry out most of his own repairs, he was able to build himself a reasonably sized operation.
Breaking into his flow of conversation, I ask him to list some of the machines he’s owned over the years.
Now I can write fairly quickly (if not legibly), and the answers run thick and fast:
- 2x 111As
- 2x 222Gs
- 1x 252
- 1x 259 (these six are all WABCOs)
- D6 and scoop
- D85 and scoop
- D155 and scoop
- D65 blade
- 2x Bomag compactors
- 686 Champion grader
- 1x 742 John Deere skidder and discs
I think there may have been more, but I ran out of steam writing, so I ask the question, “How many of those did you own at one time?”
A perplexed look comes over Joe’s face. “All of them”, is the bemused response.
Joe explains that although he absolutely loves the earthmoving business, the constraints placed upon bulk earthwork operations, such as ceasing all work between the 30 April to 1 October every year became a bit too much to endure, so he made the difficult decision to sell all of his equipment.
Fortunately for Joe, he’d developed a good relationship with Conal Dempsey of Dempsey Wood, which led to Conal’s family company purchasing some of Joe’s plant.
Given that Joe was an authority on the ins and outs of the WABCO brand, it wasn’t very long before Joe and his wife Tracy joined the Dempsey Wood team, forming a deep and lasting relationship.
While Joe spends the summer months operating one of Dempsey Wood’s 252FT WABCO machines, and Tracy holds the permanent position of fleet coordinator, Joe switches roles during the winter months and becomes the company’s mechanic and product development specialist.
Having unequivocally lived and breathed the involvement of the WABCO brand in the earthmoving business over almost half a century, there is probably no one better qualified in New Zealand than Joe Tuffs to carry out repairs on and to future-proof Robert G Le Tourneau’s motor scraper design – a fact that obviously isn’t lost on Conal Dempsey and company co-CEOs Simon and Michael Lunjevich.
Obviously, inspired by the teachings of his former boss Lou Ozich, Joe has made quite a number of innovative changes to RG Le Tourneau’s original creation by adding ‘hungry boards’ to the bowls of the Dempsey Wood machines, which allow their machines to carry extra capacity and fan blades, which alter pitch at programmed intervals to extract dust and debris from the radiators of their rather large machines.
Dempsey Wood’s current fleet of WABCO motor scrapers consists of four WABCO 252FT machines, which are powered by two Detroit 8V92 turbocharged engines, each with a capacity of 550 horsepower, giving the entire unit 1100 horsepower to scoop up 27 cubic yards (approx. 30m3) of soil in approximately half a minute when aided by the onboard elevator unit.
Any operator who has been around long enough to have operated the WABCO motor scrapers will be aware that the 252FT machines were originally powered by two 330 horsepower Detroit 8V71 engines (the ‘71’ references 71 cubic inches per cylinder), which often had to work quite hard in extreme conditions, and were not entirely fuel efficient enough to meet Dempsey Wood’s commitment to its emissions reduction targets.
Always one with a keen eye on creating better efficiencies, Joe came up with a unique idea that at first appeared a little unusual, to say the least.
During a planning meeting with his bosses, Joe suggested increasing the combined power of their machines from 660 horsepower (2x 8V71 engines) to the 1100 horsepower that could be obtained by fitting 2x 8V92 Detroit engines.
The idea worked a treat, producing an amazing 33 per cent fuel saving at the same time as reducing emissions.
Joe says that while the replacement engines are larger in capacity, because they don’t have to work as hard as the smaller units, greater fuel efficiency is achieved – a brilliant concept indeed.
It perhaps is worth noting that the 1100hp that Joe currently can access with two pedals under his right foot is quite a bit more than the 160hp he thought was unbelievable when he first sat at the controls of Lou Ozich’s WABCO 111A way back in 1986.
Dempsey Wood Civil’s founding director Conal Dempsey sums up Joe Tuff’s modifications to the iconic WABCOs in a succinct five-word sentence: “Yesterday’s machines built for tomorrow.”
Writer’s note:
The development of the motor scraper is well worth a read for anybody who’s interested in the earthmoving industry. I’d particularly recommend picking up a book on RG Le Tourneau (1888 -1969) who made massive strides in the concept’s development due to problems he experienced while working on the Hoover Dam in the Nevada Desert in the 1930s.
Surely, RG would be proud to know that there are still people like Joe Tuffs and his employer Dempsey Wood Civil, who are carrying on his tradition of innovation and the improvement and preservation of his beloved Le Tourneau Westinghouse WABCO motor scrapers.
Images by Lyndsay Whittle and supplied