Yep, those older 18 wheelers were NOT easy to shift, in any way shape or form.

Random memory. Whilst I was at Clemson, my car in my last couple of years was

a 1964 Pontiac Catalina station wagon, a model called a Safari. I think they called it that because it was so big, you could have fit most of Africa inside it. Three FULL rows of seating, and with the back two laid down, you could fit a pretty good sized Jonboat in the back.

One Sunday morning, I was bored, with absolutely nothing to do, so I decided to drive, alone, up into the foothills of North Carolina, from Clemson. I went as far as Highlands, before I discovered that on the weekend, they literally rolled up the street. There was NOTHING open, and nothing to do but turn around and go back home to Clemson.

Having gone uphill for almost all the trip up to Highlands, which turned out to be aptly named, I decided to try an experiment on the return trip. What can I say, I majored in Chemical Engineering, and I grew up doing mechanic work on a farm. I wanted to see how far I could coast back down the mountains before I had to accelerate on my own. I put the big Pontiac beast in neutral, and quickly found out that coasting was not going to be a problem. Burning up my brakes might be.

I was continually having to use the brakes to slow the car down, and they got hot enough that I was beginning to smell asbestos (old timey drum brakes, you know?) by the time things finally flattened out. I had coasted the better part of TWENTY EIGHT MILES downhill from Highlands, I estimated. I say estimated, because there was one time I had to put it in gear and get up one small rise, which I would not have had to do if I had not overapplied the brakes coming down the previous turning grade.

By the time I made it all the way back to Clemson and parked, my brakes were literally smoking and drums making popping noises from wheel bearing grease being so hot. I learned a lot about the phenomenon known as brake fade that day, along with the fact that Highlands, North Carolina on a Sunday morning in 1975 was just about one of the deadest places on earth. College kids back then really did have too much time on their hands at times, you know?

Re: Random memory. Whilst I was at Clemson, my car in my last couple of years was

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May 16, 2024, 11:45 AM

As part of my dad's farming operation, he had a couple of Mack trucks, "B-61 Thermodyne" designations. They each had a ten speed transmission, which was actually five speeds and a dual High / Low range. We used them to haul trailers of wheat, oats, soybeans or corn from a couple of local ginneries down to the port in Charleston. I never did get the hang of "double clutching" and shifting the gears on either of those trucks without a little grinding going on. Our main driver, an older guy, could do it in his sleep. I mostly just drove the trucks around the farm, but on one occasion, we had two trips that needed to be made at the same time, so I followed him in our second truck and trailer, all the way to the port. That is easily the most nervous I have ever been driving anything in my life, but we made it there and back in one piece.

As an aside to this story, our driver told me a humorous story about human ingenuity in a crisis. He could tell, within a couple hundred pounds, how much stuff he had loaded into our trailer for a trip to the port. We had a 27 ton license, which only came into play on the road. The port didn't care how much load you had, they wanted the material, at least back then, so the more you hauled, the more you got paid. Our driver said he knew he had about 30 tons on this load.

Truckers had a signal system set up back then, even before the days of CB radios, of blinking their headlights in a certain sequence, to let other truckers know there was a weigh station open up ahead. Usually then, if you were overloaded, you would detour on the back roads to get around it. But, on this particular day, when the signal came, he said there WERE no more roads between him and the weigh station. So, what could he do?

He had some quarts of oil with him, to replenish what the old Mack might use at any time. He took a couple quarts, he said, and poured them all over the engine. By the time he got to the weigh station, and got in line, there was a WHOLE lot of smoke coming from under the hood. The troopers came out, asked him what was going on, and he told them it had started making noises and smoking a few miles back, like it was about to have major engine problems.

So, they told him, music to his ears, "Well, we can't have that thing blow up on our scales and shut our whole operation down for hours while we get a tow vehicle out here. Get out of line, and go around, and get it out of here!" A littler further down the road, all the oil had smoked off, things got back to normal, and he eventually pulled into the port with what turned out were just under THIRTY ONE tons of grain.

And, they all lived happily ever after.

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Re: Random memory. Whilst I was at Clemson, my car in my last couple of years was

Random memory. Whilst I was at Clemson, my car in my last couple of years was

Re: Random memory. Whilst I was at Clemson, my car in my last couple of years was

Re: Random memory. Whilst I was at Clemson, my car in my last couple of years was