Maxidyne

Great engine, but can it pass EPA highway emissions standards?

A 673 should be around 2000 to 2400 pounds, depending on how many accessories are on it. You want to have the engine as close to the forklift as possible of course, you lose capacity as the load is moved farther out.

A lot of times the problem is trying to run something they know nothing about. Continental Baking, the bigger company of what merged to become Hostess, was a public company with listed stock and made profits through the depression. Their strength was that pretty much all they did was baking and related stuff like delivery. Then ITT bought them in the late 60s and cut investment, but the company stayed profitable. In the early 80s Ralston Purina bought Continental and another unrelated business, Eveready batteries. They tried running it like a dog food/cereal company and it was a disaster. So they dumped Continental and it merged with an absolute joke of. company, Interstate Brands, to become Hostess. They brought in some cast off execs from Pepsico to run Hostess and they sunk it with debt while product quality deteriorated. No surprise they ran Hostess into the ground. Meanwhile, United States Bakeries in the Pacific Northwest is run by ex-Continetal Baking executives following the old Continental system and they're profitably the most successful baker in their region. They even bought some of the closed Hostess bakeries and reopened them and put some of the Hostess trucks back on the road.

Thanks for a rare insight into a Iranian built Mack- Very impressive build and can't be many of these left.

The fortunate lack of regens jives with what I'm hearing- The smaller and harder working engines run hotter inside the combustion chamber and thus need less supplemental regens.

This new "Modification Center" sounds interesting- Being this is for Broncos and Rangers I doubt this is for commercial uplifts. Perhaps Ford is seeing all the thousands of dollars many Jeep owners are spending on fancy wheels and other poser mods and want a share of that market?

I've had good experience with powder coating with a couple different shops. But like you said, the cost of entry is low so there's more powder coaters out there than the market can probably support. The first powder coater I used went under and the county economic development authority foreclosed on their loan and is now trying to sell the shop and equipment. The second powder caters has a more realistic business plan, he's renting space at the auto repair shop he works at so his investment is minimal. Given that you've already got a shop, if the price is right this could be a good deal for you.

Looks like any non-compete with IVECO is no longer in force...

Naw, just didn't have good internet access over the holidays and everyone has pretty much mellowed out anyways. The U model someone posted looks nice and tempting, but having only a 7 foot garage door I'd best be sticking to model Macks, of which there's been some nice pix lately. Anybody know if any of the old Mack models like AMT are still available?

OK, sounds like we're agreeing on some things and turning from argument to conversation. Sorry if I lay into the newbies wanting to make an old truck do something it won't, but I've seen too many people lose money they can't afford to going down that route. That said, you. can turn a road tractor into a durable dump truck, etc.., Mack did it themselves when they offered frame liners and such on the CH. So I'll try to be more constructive and less condemning. As for arguing politics, most everyone's mind is made up so it's a waste of time.

I suspect that electrics will carve out a market share but never take over the market, as they can't compete on functionalities like price and range. But if everyone bought cars for functionality we'd all be driving front wheel drive econoboxes, vans, or work trucks. 20% of the U.S. market is older suburbanites who buy 4x4 pickups that never venture beyond the malls and haul no more than the odd Costco lootings or garden bits from the big box home store. Electric vehicles will probably build a similar irrational slice of the market of folks who want to be seen as environmentalists.

I go back and forth on this- The Ford powertrain is perfectly adequate for most buyers needs. But a lot of buyers have more confidence in Cummins and Allison, so Ford should give the buyers what they want.

Sorry Mack Tech, you aren't doin' that well at economics. Back during the recession when a high percentage of home sales were foreclosures auctions did in fact set the market. Coming out of that private capital funds and REITs bought up huge blocks of homes and have thus created a wholesale market for homes. In trucking over 80% of new truck sales and leases are made to fleets with 5 or more trucks. The resale of those trucks is sometimes even agreed to before they're even delivered- Daimler is (in)famous for that. A few lease companies retail their own used trucks because they're truck dealers too and those trucks are often good deals. But most go to the dealer only wholesale auctions where they often go for ridiculously low prices- The private sector fleets don't care because they're getting a tax break for that depreciation, which in many cases they've already taken. The public auctions you guys cite often see only the odd decade or old truck, but they do not set the market. The long nose KWs and Petes are pretty much a fetish item, a few years back some of the fleets tried them to attract drivers and get better resale but the MPG hit they took due to horrible aerodynamics and too big an engine cost more than they saved on resale. So a few of these long nose "boutique" trucks show up on the used truck lots and sit there for a year or three waiting for a "Billy Big Rigger" to come along... But that odd sale does not make a market.

Anyone stuck in a W900 for 20 years has my sympathies, After a day in an old KW conventional I was happy to go back to my Freightliner cabover. The W900 wasn't a bad truck for a 60s design, but it suffered from low volume maker Paccar's lack of access to a wind tunnel and the equipment to form compound curvature panels. Mack, GM, and Ford among others had access to better development and manufacturing tools and by the 70s all had better cabs than the Paccar conventionals. Heck, even the KW cabover had better ergonomics and probably aerodynamics than their conventional. Too bad you didn't go with a Mack, besides a better cab you'd probably get a full MPG better and another thousand pounds of payload, which would have paid for a new truck by now.

You can fantasize all you want about what Billy Big Rigger will pay for a long hood with a yellow engine, but auctions give the best public measure of a trucks worth, which tends to be 10-20% of new price for a 10 or more year old truck. As for MPG, if you put on 100k or more miles on a year you need 8 MPG to be competitive now, look at the 9 MPG new Mack of Jamie Hagen that Mack featured on their website- the fuel savings alone are damn near making the payments! As for old trucks being cheaper, only if you've got a good one and run low miles. The big companies have people that spend all day looking at the costs and doing data analytics, and while they may keep some old trucks around for yard and short haul work, they buy new trucks for the long haul and mission critical work. Sorry, that's the financial realities of trucking.

Looking at the auction results, while KWs have good resale that's a $20k truck at best. Cat parts ain't cheap, and if you figure in the cost of your labor the rebuild probably costs you $20k at least. So maybe should have sold it and bought a Mack that gets better MPG...

Simple economics- A 10 year old truck is generally worth less on the market than an engine rebuild or major modification= It's cheaper to buy another truck!

Tatra has a long and proud history, including the concept behind the VW Beetle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatra_(company)#Tatra_and_the_conception_of_the_Volkswagen_Beetle

Gee, what the heck did I step into? I'm just a retired old fart that likes to talk trucks. Owner Operators? Got the highest respect for them, tough making a living when you have to pay full price for everything while the fleets get huge discounts. And over the years, I've noticed the smartest OOs drive Macks!

Unless it has an engine "built" in 2006, a 2007 has EGR, DPF, and all the other emissions stuff.

And if you could afford a new truck you'd buy it.

We Teamsters know all about hard work. The difference is that we don't have to go broke buying a truck, spend our day off fixing it, and work 'til we can't and then die broke.

They're so few trucks from the 70s still running that banning them wouldn't accomplish anything, but they pass bans because it makes them feel good. Sort of like the mandated 6% market share for electric cars proposed here in Minnesota. I did the numbers and even at 6% market penetration by the 2030s they'd only get about a 1% reduction in greenhouse gasses, not worth the bother. So I went to a public hearing on the plan and used that in my testimony against the electric car mandate, but I used real science that they didn't want to hear so I was ignored.