Sometimes a solution to an automotive part shortage seems to be obvious. Buy a parts car. Unfortunately, this obvious solution can just add new problems. For instance, if you have an old Willys project missing a few items that you really haven’t enough time and money for, the best solution may not have been to add another Willys to the mix. Not that it stopped me from doing just that. Luckily another summer in mining was about to change my ideas about vehicles.
Another year in university had ended and it was time to head back home. My little Courier truck had attracted a mate, a little orange one that always parked beside it in the parking lot and left increasingly risqué notes under the windscreen. I would have loved to hang around and get to know the orange truck’s female owner, but I had a plane ticket for Resolute Bay NWT. I set off for another three-and-a-half-month stint with a little less enthusiasm than previously. The plane rides up started with a 737 though the final jaunt was usually a Twin Otter but sometimes a vintage DC3. Once there I was happy to resume the long shifts that kept me in tuition.
I spent time in the concentrator but could be dispatched anywhere on the island. Often, I was underground helping to repair and adjust the miles of conveyor belts or alternately as a welder’s helper. This involved lots of uncoiling wire, handing out rods and standing fire watch. Since this is not a mining blog, I guess I should move to the automotive side of things.
Mechanized mining is a tough environment for any piece of equipment and most light vehicles are not built for it. For fire safety reasons the vehicles must be diesel and the rough conditions underground are quite beyond any normal use. Body damage from rock walls and squeezing past scoop trams is constant.
There had been an International Scout or two, which along with a Unimog left over from exploration times resided in the scrap pile. We had a K35 GMC welding truck with a 6.2 diesel that was barely up to the task of forward momentum when loaded. A few more GMCs ran around on the surface, but they did not have the air scrubbers for underground use. Plastic parts would not hold up to the extreme cold and if I remember right, there were plastic parts in the transfer cases of the K35 as the welding truck was out of commission for a long time waiting for a rebuild.
What worked best was the Land Cruisers. BJ40, BJ42, HJ60s, BJ75s, HJ78s and whatever else they made in the 1980s and 1990s. There were specialized underground mancarriers in use, but any underground maintenance work was done by Land Cruiser.
All manner of contraptions and armor was welded to them to make them more useful and less susceptible to damage.
Some were seemingly bone stock, other than the exhaust scrubbers, looking just like the Land Cruisers down at the Toyota dealer, as in Canada the last Land Cruisers were diesel.
If a vehicle was turned off it may have been too cold to ever restart one, so they just idled 24 hours a day. Even in the residence, you were never far from the sound and smell of an idling Toyota.
Even if you were not a big believer in Japanese trucks, a few months in that environment would go some ways to make you one, especially considering the consequences of vehicle failure could be life-threatening. Most people didn’t rush home and buy Cruisers as there were far nicer choices available in civilization, I found it interesting that American cars were still aspirational to some of the tradesmen I worked with. They bought Firebirds and Cadillacs as they had a lot of money to spend. One middle aged guy cracked me up one day when he came back from a rotation down south and wanted to impress us with talk of his recent dream car purchase, a new Chevy Monte Carlo. I was fine until he paused, lowered his glasses and his voice and added to him, the important killer detail, “Super Sport”. Now I am in late middle age I understand his excitement, but at the time he could have said the all-new Hyundai Pony and it wouldn’t have been funnier to car guy me.
Of course the last BJ42s in Canada were the 1984s so a replacement was needed.
Not surprising the 70 Series was the next choice. It lacked the easily repairable body of the 40 series so it required a bit more armor but they were every bit as tough as the old 40 series had been.
Even this fancy one came off some dealer’s lot depriving some future collector of a LHD BJ 70. After the BJ70s were no longer brought into Canada importers supplied the need with later 70 series trucks that were not highway legal but since the mine was private that wasn’t a concern.
The welding truck I spent so much time with makes an appearance in the background behind our maintenance “Jeep.” They were always called Jeeps by the miners.
As mentioned above the 40 series were a bit more modular in construction and often sported parts from scrapped ones to replace smashed body panels.
There were a few Hilux’s. The worst thing about them was, as anyone who bought a JDM Prado in Canada and headed up the Coquihalla can attest, is the L Series Diesel doesn’t seem to be all that robust. We were using the truck below, doing conveyor work nine days after it had a new engine installed and the engine started smoking enough that it was dangerous for it to be underground. We headed up the long spiral tunnel to the surface and parked it with, yet another blown up engine. I don’t think the rest of the trucks ever had a chance to wear out as the engines didn’t last long enough. Not taking a shot at the Hilux as we shall see a bit later, I am a fan. But as a mine truck they were not up to scratch.
It was too cold and dirty for a camera most days but there was an old Bombardier around,
And a big old crane, Ford Louisvilles, a school bus, 4wd Econolines, and all manner of Cat loaders and dozers. But the Cruisers were the star of the show for me.
As far as I know, all of this boneyard was taken down the mine and buried as part of reclamation.
Anyways to return to the subject of this COAL, when I got back from up north, I still wanted to get my Willys running as I really liked the idea of them. Even though I had come to the realization that what I actually needed for my adventures was a Toyota. A colleague of a friend had a running Willys and offered it to me for a fair price and I thought that might solve my parts situation. I test drove it and it ran well enough other than the brakes were almost nonexistent. We hooked it to a friend’s new F150 and pulled it home.
About 5 minutes after I got home, I realized that I didn’t have the heart to start taking parts off the pickup to fix the wagon. The truck had a 6-cylinder flathead, a healthy rear spring pack and what looked to be a heavier-duty rear axle. The previous owner said they had been using it to get firewood and it would go where none of their other trucks would go. Dimensionally it was very much like a BJ75 Landcruiser, a smaller but heavy-duty package.
When I first got it, I pressed it into tractor service doing all my chores with it. My parents were away much of the time and when I was home, I looked after the acreage as there was wood to be cut and fences to fix and the old Willys was a useful tool for that. I had just about finished my first degree in Biology which I realized wasn’t going to get me into the wildlife side of things where I had been aiming but I decided to complete it anyways. I didn’t seem to be interested in the research that a master’s degree would entail as I felt like I wanted to be more hands on. I was starting to realize that getting proper job experience during the summers may have been more of an advantage to me than mining was. Unless it wasn’t.
Changes at the mine meant students would not be returning the next summer so come May I found myself in a 40-hour week job living at home by myself and starting in earnest on the Willys. I had been reading enthusiast magazines again, and one article that stood out to me and not in a good way, was the aftermath of a Willys wagon losing its single circuit brakes and tumbling off an embankment. I made brakes the first priority. I started changing out all the brake lines and renewing components.
I also raided the paint cabinet as I removed any corrosion I found. I have no idea why I used the colors I did, other than that was the style of the times.
The project seemed to be going well but then I upended my own life somewhat by deciding that I was going to get another degree, this time in Forestry which certainly proved to be a good way to liven up future COALs. That shortened up my summer as I had to attend a field surveying school which started early. This was the summer after the Courier had died and I was carless. I found one that needed a few repairs, so the Willys was parked for the winter and off I went back into the lecture halls.
To tie up a bunch of loose ends. I got very distracted for the next few years. I puttered at the Willys while I was home, but progress was slow. A new RV storage structure was being built in my parent’s yard right where my car collection was. I was away working, much of the time and didn’t have room to take the Willys with me. My Dad phoned the scrapyard who came and got the Cranbrook, my miscellaneous parts and I think the red Beach Wagon, though I prefer to think it went somewhere else. He gave the Willys pickup to the neighbor kids. I was very busy when this happened, so it didn’t bother me much. I was much more annoyed that he gave my mountain bikes and my Peugeot Road bike away. In a backhanded way, he did try to compensate me for this automotive and cycling massacre as we will see later on.
I never did get to hang out with the flirty girl who had the orange Courier but that was alright as I found another one. I still don’t know if I would rock a G-Body Monte Carlo SS but I would respect someone who made that choice today. Cominco deactivated the mine and returned the island to its natural state in 2002. And in sort of a happy ending a fellow found me at work a few years back as he had the Willys pick up and the registration which was still in my name. I signed it for him and wished him well so one day I expect to see it out on the road.
Next week I get with the program and start buying Japanese cars. Which doesn’t always go as smoothly as I would have hoped.
Thanks much for the insight into mining can you elaborate on the scrubbers?
If you go to mammothequipment.ca there are some examples of a few types. They are designed to take out a bunch of particulates. Even though mines are ventilated the air gets very diesel-y in a hurry.
The company name was Willys. Willy’s kept making me think it’s a competitor of Porky’s.
Oops of course it is. After John Willys.
I’ve corrected the text and title.
The underground gypsum mines near me used diesel Mitsubishi pickups under ground. They were partially dismantled and sent down in the elevators. Then reassembled never to see the light of day again. At least that’s how it was described by a customer who serviced them.
And pronounced Willis. Like the tower…
I suppose that there may be more to the story than you want to divulge, but it reads as if your dad make more or less a unilateral decision to dispose of your stuff. Holy cow, I would have been livid if that happened to me…and I’m not sure that a relationship would have survived. Brutal.
Other than that, another fine chapter! I love seeing all of the Land Cruisers and hearing the mining detail. Not a life I could have lived, but really cool to read about.
Looking forward to the next installment.
It was fine. He just got up one day and wanted the space for a new camper! No ill intent. I think in lifetime carnage on each other’s vehicles we are more or less even considering my teen years.
One day when I was about 10, my dad decided that he’d harangued me long and often enough about cleaning my room so he decided to throw all of my stuff down the stairs and then out on the lawn.
I suppose that action made a point (his point), but my main take away – and the only seeming revenge I felt at the time that I could extract on him – was that I promised myself that I would never disrespect his future grandchildren and their stuff in a similar manner. I kept that promise.
Just to emphasize the completely foreign, wait, that one word is inadequate, other-worldly and alien nature of your mining life and environment, is the fact that British diesel trucks were way more reliable and useful than Japanese diesel trucks.
That’s not how things work in the normal world… is it?
The photographs of the bleak featureless landscape, the ice floe flecked sea, and the low weak sun are enticing (from a distance). Quite a different world from the current 2023 abnormally high temperatures and humidity encountered in many locations all over the earth.
Would propane powered vehicles have worked in the mines the way such forklifts do in warehouses?
Quite the interesting COAL.
I think having one fuel type is important in remote operations. I know that Miller Technologies now has electric Land Cruisers. Ens Equipment in Saskatchewan has a wide variety of Land Cruisers available. Both websites show some pretty cool equipment.
Wow, that was super interesting for a variety of reasons. I work in concentrator equipment so hearing about the old Cominco Polaris mine was very cool. Too bad all those Land Cruisers were buried in the mine reclamation (which thankfully was pretty well done). A friend has a former mine Land Cruiser as a bush vehicle at his rural property, it’s just a running chassis as the body was totally destroyed when he got it.
And knowing that the Willys pickup is still out there must be very gratifying. I’ve never had any of my old cars come back to me. (Other than my motorcycle being found crashed and abandoned a few weeks after I sold it)
Well that’s a pretty cool coincidence. There was little ability to use gravity at Polaris so maintaining cyclone pumps was a constant. I remember changing out all the liners in the ball mill not being fun.
Really cool learning more about the inner workings of a mining operation. There’s apparently a lot more to it than short guys singing “Hi-ho, hi-ho” as they head to a day of swinging a pickaxe.
The Willys adventure ended with more of a whimper than I had been hoping, but it could have been worse. I was a little sad about the old Cranbrook, too. And you found another flirty girl with an orange Courier? Quite a coincidence. 🙂
Another excellent chapter Jograd, thank you for this. I made my first trip to a more southern part of the Arctic this spring and while not nearly that far north, it is certainly a different world for those of us who grew up around the 49th parallel.
The mine vehicles and their short lives was very interesting.
Looking forward to more, well done!
Fascinating, I hope you’ll continue to drop bits about mining into your future posts .
About the parents & one’s things : as long as you’re stuck living at home you need to respect their wishes .
When my son became an adult & moved away he left behind some things, I asked him if he wanted them and he said no so most of it is gone now .
Looking forward to the next chapter .
-Nate
You broke one of the cardinal rules of car collecting – never fall in love with your parts car. Luckily it worked out pretty well for you.
Very few people can say they lived and worked in one of Canada’s northern most occupied cities. Did you have to take any special precautions for polar bears?
We rarely worked more than a few yards from a vehicle partly for that reason. There were a few Inuit employed by the mine who had rifles if need be when a bear became destructive or dangerous. A few times when we flew on a fishing trip the pilot would buzz the bears with the Twin Otter and then stand guard with a rifle.
I watched through binoculars while a polar bear staked out a seal hole in the ice. The seal came up and the bear killed it with a swipe. Very impressive animals and I consider myself to be lucky to see one in the wild.
Thanks Jograd.
Yes very lucky. I think most tourists see them via beefed up Tundra Buggies or in my case the local zoo. You have written a nice series of articles. What makes your series standout is not only that you took so many pictures (great hindsight). Its that you did so using a 35mm film camera that when exposed to the elements would freeze solid in a matter of seconds. Great work!
Truly fascinating, learned so much from this post. Bit curious that the Hiluxes didn’t last as well as the Land cruisers did though, wonder which generation of L engine they had. If I recall right the 2.2 litre “L” and 2.4 litre “2L” had some durability issues that were mostly solved by the next iteration, the 2.8 Litre “3L”. But maybe even that wasn’t enough for the rigors of mining life.
The turbo Ls seemed to be a disaster, Maybe filtration as it is very very dusty. The old B and H diesels were pretty tough and simple. Once a lot of the small diesels hit the 15 year old mark and were able to be imported it was very surprising how many were taken out by very normal driving conditions here. Mitsubuishi and Toyota both, Especially seeing the reputation of diesel HiLuxes elsewhere else in the world.
There is upcoming HiLux content!