CaptainCrutch

A friend of ours has a trucking company in WV hauling dry bulk cement, if you’re just a driver they pay you about 35% of the load. If you lease one of their trucks you get about 75% of the load and they still take care of some regular maintenance. But they have a deal with a guy who owns a bunch of trucks and lets people operate them so for every load that gets done with one of his truck they pay him 80% of those loads and I think I heard he divides out close to 45% of what he gets to his drivers. He drives himself too... and business is booming btw! Just a few years ago they got to haul cement to build a rocket launch pad after one of the rocket came back down way too early and decimated the last one. My mom’s one of their dispatchers part-time. They have their own mechanics in house so that saves a ton on maintenance costs as well. The reason this isn’t a more popular place to work is that you’re lucky to get two loads a day and each load is typically 3-4 hours there and back, and they don’t work weekends unless they get a call for a load on Thursday or early Friday. The current owner was lucky because the business was built up by her dad so now she just works as a dispatcher and collects that 10-60% of each load, and there’s only 4 other dispatchers that all but one is part time and then 2 full time mechanics so wages aren’t that much from that 10-40%. No payments on trucks and no payments on the land. I hope that puts it into some perspective.

Found this one online, seems like it meets your requirements other than the sleeper... https://www.truckpaper.com/listings/trucks/for-sale/19590675/1987-mack-superliner-rw713

It’s another social media owned by Facebook, but only pictures...

I’ve always thought it’d be cool to take an old conked out Mack and put a big electric motor on the cog and fill the frame and hood with batteries. Obviously wouldn’t do it with a trimming one though...

The Semi hasn’t gone away, in fact I saw just recently they were still filing patents for new components, I think the updated timeline is summer 2020. The other thing about Tesla is they almost never meet production timelines, the one exception is their upcoming Model Y which is early because it’s basically a bigger version of their Model 3. No new tech is needed for it. They bumped back Semi and Roadster 2.0 to make room for Model Y and this new Cybertruck, but now that those are out of the way they can focus on actually producing all the products they’ve unveiled...

Who needs a team of Huskies with a dog sled when you could have a bulldog hauling a bulldog! Someone should pitch that to that Ice Road Truckers show... a team of actual bulldogs haul a truck out of a ditch and then someone makes a comment about being built like a Mack... Anyways it was a pretty cool commercial!

Tesla would service the truck but it doesn’t require regular maintenance, you only need to see them when something breaks, but some smaller shops are opening that are capable of dealing with them. The things don’t even use the break pad they have all that often, they just turn up the resistance in the motors instead. But it’s a unibody design so I’m pretty sure if you get in any crash the thing is totaled... Although, they beat the thing with a sledge hammer and steel balls and everything was fine other than some cracked windows.

I agree it looks terrible, but I've been doing my research and on their newer models it's damn near impossible to ruin one of their batteries, and the things have been going for 7+ years now! There was a story a while back about a journalist trying to kill a Tesla and when he finally gave up after putting the car through hell and refusing to charge it at any stations along the route, it still had more than enough power to climb up onto a rollback. Speaking of road trips, I know a lot of people who can and do it anyways in their Teslas (they're all from Maryland, but none of them are liberal and hate the state as much as I do so they all roadtrip out to Ohio or Tennessee), apparently there's plenty of charging stations all over, and supposedly they're bringing charging times down under an hour so most of them just stop to eat and by they time they're done the car is charged and ready to roll. As for having more money... you can get a brand new Tesla for around $35,000, which is pretty good for a brand new luxury sedan, which is exactly what class it falls in. As for the fact you're still burning coal, yes but from what I've read that process is still about 4x more energy efficient than burning gas in a car. I should add that I'm not the biggest fan of Tesla, and it'll be a long while before I even consider owning one, but I'm just pointing out the lessons I've learned on this. I used to think like you until one of my friends got an old Tesla Model S and I did some research. Personally I think gas is going to be hard to come by with regulations like the EU are pushing, so going electric in the next 10-15 seems inevitable, and if I have to convert a vehicle of mine to electricity, I'm going do it with Tesla batteries and motors because nobody can compete! They're about 5 years ahead of the competition on that front. I just wish this truck looked better, the specs are pretty great for what it is! Maybe I'm wrong but this is just what I've read about and talked to people with first hand experience about... Regardless it's an ugly truck!

Well I'm doing my part in researching this, but what do you all think of Tesla's new Cybertruck. It's an all electric pickup truck that starts just shy of $40,000 and can haul 7,500 lbs for 250 miles or be configured to go 500 miles hauling 14,000+ lbs AND drive itself for shy of $77,000. It also easily beats a Porsche on the drag strip. It's going back to being an old 6 seater with a center seat that folds into a center console. Not to mention the tailgate fold into a ramp and the suspension comes standard as auto leveling airbags. It also comes standard with 120/240 volt outlets and a tap off the air compressor for the airbags. The main downside? Most people would say it's pretty! Pretty ugly... but everyone has their own taste I guess... So what do y'all think?

All liberal states are like that, they drive 10-25 over the speed limit minimum but the second there’s the hint of rain suddenly they’re all going 10-25 under while making terrible and dangerous moves all over the road... not to mention anyone driving a truck, even a little pickup just about takes up two lanes because they can’t figure out a truck is wider than their Chinese commuter car! Only good drivers on the road I see anymore are guys running big dumps or mixers to and from all these new construction sites.

It’d be nice to see it with all the lights on, seems kinda like the idea me and my dad have for Christmas parades in our green and white firetrucks... only they’ll be able to roll and not held to the ground by wires...

If it drives and he doesn’t take it I just might...

As rare as these are I’m certain but you never know... especially with that decal they’ve put on the doors.

That old W-71 there looks like Dr. Bill Comcowich’s... here’s some video of him and his rig. They’ve got the same paint and configuration atleast...

Did anybody ever end up buying this rig or were you all too busy bickering over the condition that it's in? It's nice to see such a rare model still exist, and the price should be high so you know the person buying it has the dough to put into it, I'm sure it wasn't exactly in pristine condition when Superdog purchased it... I wish they made more of this model actually, my dad really likes it, and he's a big fan of old LTs so this COE version he likes a good bit since he started out driving old CFs, and we just don't have them money to buy a decent LT or the money to restore one that may not be so great, let alone one of these rare Ws! Maybe one day after he finally retires or me or my brother strike it rich somehow...

It really is a shame FDNY didn't renew the system and let it retire. For being such a specialized engine it was used surprisingly often, even towards the end, from one of the charts I saw there were a few years it responded on average more than once a day. It was brought about for a reason and more than proved itself in the cases it was built for. I agree with the rest of you in saying I wish the pumper had been taken up by a real museum dedicated to this type of device that actually have the will and way of restoring it to competely operable condition. In the meantime the best we can due is wait for the current owner to go bankrupt or croak and someone with quite a lot of cash to pick the thing up and get her back to the condition she should be in. I know a few guys who've said if they ever win the lottery that's exactly what they'll do... heck, I know by DC with a sizable collection that he prides himself in and more than enough money to take on the projects. Atleast the tender seems to be in good hands...

I can't find it and I've tried a few different ways of searching it. Good info on the loss of steer on the tender, and excellent pictures of the two in operation! Really shows how badly FDNY needed it at the time if they sent it into action before they had even completed training on it. Makes me even more giddy to try and get a group together to get her pumping again... if only I had the time or money...

Anyone have "brochure" for that W71? Reminds me a good bit of the old Bullnose Kenworths.

Anyone know what happened to the tiller on the tender, and subsequently why the tender had a backwards facing tiller while the pumper had none at all? I've been doing some research on the SPS and all the models and some photos show it with a tiller but most of the photos, especially modern photos show it with the tiller removed. Other than that I just wish the pumper would get fixed, even if it took the current owner starting a GoFundMe and a majority of us would donate, and the tender meet up with the pumper so we could see how the system was supposed to operate, instead of just having the pumper sit around useless and the tender having to be pumped by 4 other engines... It's a real shame that the Super Pumper was retired and a successor was never purchased. I can find no footage of the Super Pumper living up to it's name and pumping! If anyone can find and that'd be awesome.

Still really good, sent mine there!

Here’s a video of the last time it was running...

I remember seeing that one up for sale a while ago when I was looking for an old LTL for my dad, and remember passing on it just because the radiator isn’t the LT kind that he likes... nice to hear it’ll end up in good hands! Good luck with the retrofit!

I think it's perfect just the way it is, other than the rear bumper looking bare and I'm partial to a dual stick Mack drive train... but as Mrs.Mack said the main negative I see is it's not mine... What do you plan on doing with it once it's done? I see you've gone through a good bit of trouble building that box for the trailer lines...

I know from experience that there’s an electric fuel pump in the back close to the fuel tank on those, and the line is too long for one fuel pump to work. Make sure that’s working before you go too much further... you can pretty easily pump through the old mechanical pump, so honestly if you do need to stick one on there just do as yarnall did with his. We took entirely too long to figure out that the problem was an electric fuel pump we didn’t even know about...