Back to the fifties and sixties, featuring a duo of conventional dump trucks from Germany, both with a 4×2 drivetrain and a Meiller Kipper three-way dump bed with wooden dropsides. Classic and basic, from front bumper to tail lights. And with an absolute bare minimum of plastic parts.
Exactly 70 years old, this 1955 M.A.N. Diesel 515 L1.
The driving force is a 115 DIN-hp, M.A.N. Diesel D 1046 M inline-six with a displacement of 7,983 cc.
The payload capacity of the medium-duty chassis-cab is five tonnes (11,000 lbs), the weight of the bed or complete body included.
Around a decade younger than the M.A.N. Diesel, a 16 tonnes (GVWR, 35,300 lbs) Büssing Commodore SK.
Such heavy-duty, long-nose conventionals once ruled the German Autobahns. Because of overall length (and weight) restrictions, they faded away after 1960. The conventionals only survived in and around construction sites. In the dedicated on-highway transport business, the cabovers took over.
Already an old-school truck in the mid-sixties, certainly from a Büssing point of view. It must be powered by their 192 DIN-hp, indirect injected, 11.4 liter S11/200 inline-six diesel.
A trailer coupling, well sure, there’s exactly enough power to form a 32 tonnes (70,600 lbs) truck-trailer combination. At least six DIN-hp per tonne gross vehicle weight was legally required, back then in Germany. You can do the math.
On the left side of the tail gate, a ‘take your time’ advice. Back in the fifties, this was Gasolin’s way of saying ‘drive safely’.
Related reading:
MAN 26.281 DHK Dreiseitenkipper – Round-Faced And Steely-Spined
Nicely restored old school tippers, the ten ton pay rate was where I started, thankfully trucks improved or I wouldnt have gone back to driving them,
Dump trucks with a 4×2 drivetrain are very rare in NL, but if I’m not mistaken, they still thrive in Germany. An example is the demo-DAF LF (XB these days) below with a -yes indeed- Meiller three-way dump bed. Payload capacity 11.5 tonnes.
Three-way dump, that’s a handy trick, I like it! Photo #8 I’m assuming that’s a parking brake drum on the pinion of that double reduction rear?
Agreed.
I wonder if they ever did shine like this, even when they were new.
Well, whatever. It is always a pleasure to see an old Büssing.
One can never see enough Büssings.
Cool trucks! In North America, I imagine most people would think that Büssing “looks weird”. The only North American conventional trucks I know of which were built with such an extreme “axle-back” setup were AWD trucks from FWD, Oshkosh, Walter, Coleman, that were typically used as snowplows. CCer’s – are there any other examples? Any for general service?
Hendrickson out of Chicago built some great 2wd long nose trucks. They are still in business making tandem axle systems, very good ones at that.
Hey Dave, you beat me to it! I was going to mention the same thing about Hendrickson. They had a reputation of building very tough trucks. And they had that massive look too.
In Springfield, IL the local concrete company had a fleet of Hendrickson concrete mixer trucks that survived through the late 1980’s.
Hendrickson evolved to concentration on specialty vehicles for a while – I personally saw a massive tank-retrieval vehicle – for retrieving disabled tanks on a battlefield- when I visited their Lyons, IL facility in my job as a government auditor in 1983.
Shortly thereafter they got out of the truck business completely and as you mentioned, now concentrate on truck suspensions – their ‘walking beam’ suspension is legendary.
Chad I grew up east of Rockford and there were many gravel quarries and cement plants. I saw a lot of Hendrickson cement mixer and gravel dumps trucks in straight and semi configuration. One brother of mine worked in a gravel pit and raved about those trucks.
Later in life I had to specify and design a custom truck for the gov’t and we ended up with a Hendrickson Z spring air bag tandem that had superior anti-roll properties which was important.
Put a good load of soil in that dump bed and the weight distribution would be all wrong if the truck had its steering axle all the way at the front. Even the short-nose conventionals (and all Euro-cabovers, for that matter) have a set-back steering axle, see the article’s M.A.N. Diesel and the MAN 26.281 in the link at the bottom.
Thanks!
The standard dump truck in North America is usually a 6×4, and looks something like this, often with pusher or tag axles. Sometimes you get one that is axle-back, but never to the extent seen above. I think its all about the different formulas for maximum weight on each axle.
Optimal weight distribution was one thing—and probably the most important.
But Büssing was also always concerned with easy access to the engine. Look at the design of the bumper: a real work platform.
I love beautifully restored trucks like you show. So time consuming.
The Bussing looks to have some sort of certralized chassis lubrication system installed. Those systems were once fairly common here in the U.S., but tended to over-grease some lubrication points while not sending enough to others. In addition, such systems did not negate the need to visually check each lubication point for the proper amount of grease. Beautiful trucks!
That Büssing is an amazing looking vehicle; the axle setback combined with the long engine hood. The M.A.N. put me in mind of some British trucks I saw in my childhood, but the Büssing’s proportions just seem startling! I’m trying to imagine what it would have been like to drive one; I imagine it’d give your shoulders a workout.
If I had had a die cast metal toy version of that M.A.N. truck as a little kid, it would have been a prized possession for both its color and the dump truck action.
A brief explanation of “Gasolin.”
It is – as you’ve probably already guessed – a German mineral oil and gasoline brand. The brand was owned by “Deutsche Gasolin Aktiengesellschaft (D.G.A.),” registered in Berlin.
The American reader may be interested in the company’s ownership structure. When the company was founded in 1926, it was as follows:
Shareholders were I.G. Farben, A. Riebeck’sche Montanwerke AG (formerly Hugo Stinnes-Riebeck Oel-AG), Royal Dutch (“Shell”), and Standard Oil of New Jersey (“Exxon”), each with a 25% stake.
The company existed until 1970.