Profile: On the road again—Part 2
In the second and final instalment, Deals on Wheels' Lyndsay Whittle recounts his experience of being on the road for his first paid truck driving job in almost 55 years ago
Following on from Part One last month whereby a strange set of circumstances, I’d landed myself a part-time job driving six-wheel tip trucks for Avondale-based company Rainbow Haulage, we pick up the story on Auckland’s south-western motorway.
When company boss Colin Dunn had asked me a few weeks earlier if I’d be prepared to help him out for a couple of days a week, I’d agreed to the proposal on the condition that as my drive, he’d put me in a 2003 Isuzu FVZ that I’d admired for some time.
"Shouldn’t take too long to build up the muscle memory to perfect it," I thought to myself. Well, I was in for a bit of a surprise, as it appears that it actually does take a bit longer for an old dog to learn new tricks.
Although I’ve put in quite a few odometer clicks in trucks of a similar size over the years, the majority of that work has been in the general freight game, so it’s fair to say that I needed some up-skilling when it came to entering quarries and tip sites.
I did own a tip truck (a five-tonne OLB Bedford) back in the ’60s—just to give you an idea just how old I am—and currently, I have a three-tonne Daihatsu tipper that I use on odd jobs, onto which I load with my 1.8-tonne digger, so learning some new disciplines was high on my list of things to do.
One of the things I found most mind-boggling was not only the amount of tip sites there are around Auckland city but also the number of trucks that are on those sites at any given time.
It’s hard to comprehend the number of residential building sites being developed in the suburbs. Casual observers would pass by a narrow driveway sitting among in-fill housing and assume that there must be yet another single dwelling being constructed, only to learn multiple dwellings are now filling these sites.
It’s almost unbelievable to think that where just one family resided a year ago, in a short space of time, there’ll be four or five times that number of families living on the same block of land. However, all the development is providing lots of work for the people who live in Auckland and surrounding areas.
Anyway, back at the overcrowded tip sites. There are trucks and loaders going in every direction, with horns being tooted giving instructions to drivers to back up or go forward, so it takes a little while to figure out who that toot is intended for, with the first thought being have I done something that I’m going to get in trouble for?
But like everything, you soon get your head around the protocols and eventually things start to go more smoothly—most of the time anyway. After about three weeks of working together, the Isuzu and I had become bosom buddies, so much so that on one particular job that involved shifting wet fill from one end of a building site to the other—a distance of about 150 metres in axle-deep soil—we both managed the exercise without getting stuck.
Out with the old, in with the new
Now with a couple of months under my belt and feeling at home behind the wheel of the FVZ Isuzu, I was looking forward to setting off on my next job early one Monday morning, only to be told I’d be driving a much-newer truck—a 2016 Mitsubishi FN280 fleet number 24.
Being of a similar horsepower to the Isuzu and with the same gearshift pattern albeit connected to a synchromesh box as opposed to the Isuzu’s crash box, the truck turned out to be not all that different to drive.
The one difference I did notice was that the power bands of the two truck brands are quite different as the Mitsi revs an extra 900rpm higher (up to 2900rpm) making it a little easier to keep at a steady 50km/h pace.
In sixth gear, the Isuzu did have quite a noisy injector rattle, which became more noticeable when the truck hit the engine revs overrun just at that crucial 50km/h mark. While it wasn’t doing any harm, it would’ve been more pleasant if the rattle wasn’t there.
More work in the pipeline
Since my shift to the Mitsubishi Fighter number 24, I’ve been put on yet another Fighter, fleet number 19, which is a 2015 model and essentially isn’t any different to the one-year newer number 24.
Who knows what’s in store in future weeks, but it’s looking like there’s plenty more work
in the pipeline with all that construction going on in the city. All that construction means more people and more people equals more traffic on our already crowded roads.
This, coupled with Auckland City Council’s penchant for speed humps and those ridiculous speed platforms, on-ramp traffic lights, and such, it looks like we’re all in for a bumpy ride.
Oh, and by the way, I did mention last month that I was initially concerned about the ERoad dashboard display, which as an old-timer, I thought was going to be an intrusion on my privacy in the cab.
Turns out that when I changed trucks to one of the Mitsubishi Fighters, it was fitted with an early version of the ERoad module with far fewer features than the one I was concerned about in the beginning. Strangely, I actually missed the driving prompts and wound up preferring the enhanced monitoring features—funny that!
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