Taken at the ATCA (Antique Truck Club of America) truck show held annually at the Macungie Memorial Park in Macungie, Pennsylvania.
I found this interesting story about this very truck written by Jim Donnelly in Hemmings Motor News from June 2007:
"The reality is, this 1942 Sterling HC144, with its Rex barrel mixer, might never have been finished had not its owner, George Edwards, found it when it was still relatively intact. It probably didn't hurt that Edwards runs a concrete firm in northeastern Pennsylvania, but in the long run, it didn't really help him, either.
This is not the Sterling brand that exists today, a unit of Freightliner, which used to be the Ford heavy truck line until Ford sold it off in 1997. This Sterling was once one of the United States' best-known producers of heavy trucks. Sterling was begun in Milwaukee in 1907 as the Sternberg Motor Truck Company, named by its founder, William Sternberg. In 1916, Sternberg changed the company's name to Sterling, an effort to blunt anti-German venom during World War I. In 1938, Sterling acquired the assets of West Coast truck builder Fageol. In 1951, Sterling was acquired by White, which continued to build trucks under the Sterling-White name until 1957.
For a time, Edwards, who already owned a Sterling dump truck, ran classified ads, which one day, improbably, got a response from a man in Nova Scotia, who called him in 1992 and said he had a 1942 Sterling with a Rex mixer for sale. As the seller told it, the rig had spent its entire working life in the Canadian Maritimes. Edwards bought it, sight unseen. The ensuing restoration took 6½ years to complete.
A look at what Edwards started with might lead you to wonder what took so long, given that so much of the truck was already there, including the crucial mixer body. The first problem was that restoring any Sterling truck is uncommonly labor-intensive, because Sterlings, unlike most other trucks, made extensive use of wood in both their cab and frame construction. For instance, each frame channel of this Sterling was fitted with a two-inch-wide beam of white oak, 22 feet long, each one bored with spaced holes for 117 bolts. The cab required numerous smaller structural pieces of white oak, each one of which had to be cut and shaped, using the rotted original pieces as patterns.
An only slightly less daunting issue involved the Sterling's engines--plural. The first one, a 525-cu.in. Waukesha gasoline straight-six, was missing entirely. Edwards finally found a replacement that had powered a Bucyrus-Erie crane of around the same vintage as the truck. The second engine is the Waukesha 22hp inline-four that powers the mixer, which Edwards found near Wilmington, Delaware, and rebuilt, resleeving it and fitting pistons from a 390-cu.in. Ford V-8.
Another trait common to a lot of Sterlings, including this one, is its use of chain drive. Sterling was one of the final manufacturers to abandon it, in 1951. As he described, the restored rig isn't comfortable at much more than 30 mph, but what he loses in speed, he more than recovers in exclusivity. He told us, "I've been going to truck shows for more than 20 years, and in all those years, this is the only mixer I've ever seen."
[Funny that at the Macungie show, it was parked right next to another concrete mixer. Perhaps that was another of Edward's trucks.]
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