Ok. I’ll start here; truck purchasing. It’s an interesting dynamic. Seen a firetruck lately? They have these huge fully inclosed cabs that hold like 7 people. They are massive, but they take away from the potential rear deck space of the truck and you have to have a lot of room between the cab and the tool body to fit a mini skid and plywood. Sooo..., we have to find older trucks.
The older trucks have rear facing seats next to the motor that are open air seats. They stopped making them in the early 90s. That’s obviously the largest hurdle that we face. We won’t buy trucks near 100,000 miles. Really were looking for them under 50. Also around the same year ranges they made a really funky disk style air brake system that’s no longer manufactured. There’s absolutely no parts available for them. So we will not purchase them. Another issue we face is that they started making all aluminum boxes around that time as well. Obviously aluminum is not the right alloy to use for this project. It’s just not strong enough to hold and 11,000 pound lift on the dovetail. So those are the immediate issues that we face it narrows about 95 out of 100 trucks that we find out of the equation immediately. I traveled all over the country buying these trucks. We get in my class a motorhome and take a trip. We’ve learned that there’s no point going to look at one so will drive all the way across the country to look at one that we like and then on the way back will look at all the others and eventually buy one if one works.
