Some people place plastic pink flamingos in their yard as decorations. Others choose plaster gnomes or deer. Personally, I’m a fan of the up and coming trend of using trucks as lawn art. After visiting the Mahan Collection this past weekend I’v learned that the bar hast bet set very high for the rest of amateurs.
Yesterday we saw the buildings jammed full of trucks and all manor of truck related memorabilia. Today we’ll take a look at some of the trucks that make up the outdoor portion of collection. I naturally gravitated to this Mack L with a large Euclid green color dump body. The dump body seems like it would be a little much for Mack when fully loaded but who am I to judge.
Next door to the Mack was this Sterling. Or is it a Brockway? What makes the truck? The front sheet metal or the cab? In this case the cab is all Brockway inside and out. I guess this truck could be consider a glimpse of what might have been if Sterling and Brockway had joined forces instead of being purchased by White Motor Company and Mack respectively.
After looking over the dump bodies I soon noticed that no hydraulics or any other mechanism was present for dumping. Maybe you shovel out the load by hand? People were tougher back in the day fairly but also intelligent so leave the shovel at home. A loaded truck would drive under a gantry style crane that would attach to the large hooks on either side of the dump body. The crane would then lift up resulting in the body rotating on the pegs visible near what appear to be the short landing legs. I assume these legs prevented the truck from being completely flipped over by an over zealous crane operator. If you know better please let me know. The ATHS has a decent shot of this whole assembly at work on their website. View by clicking here.
Just like the barnsoutside contained so much to see that I often caught myself walking by trucks or items that would cause me to stop and stare if they were found anywhere else.
Below, a video look at the same of the trucks discussed above.