Cincinnati chapter of the American Truck Historical Society (ATHS) show in Fairborn, Ohio. Dan brought his Sterling to the show today. It was the first time I've seen it out of his shop. I hadn't known it even ran or that he was still working on restoring it. It always seemed that he was working on another of his great collection and this guy was left to gather dust. When I witnessed him win the slow truck race, I knew why he brought it. The thing is geared so low that no other truck could touch it. What a cool old truck and it sounds great too!
Tags: Fairborn Ohio semi tractor semi truck Sterling 1948 Sterling vintage truck antique truck rust rusty American Truck Historical Society ATHS HB600 Cummins 4x3 transmission historic truck big rig Dan Payne camiones lorry
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Ohio. This 1948 Sterling is part of a large collection of old trucks. Being in a relatively dark and crowded building made it difficult to photograph, but to me at least it was rare enough and cool enough to warrant posting. Behind it is a 1952 Diamond T 950S that is in the process of being restored. The owner had located a motor and transmission appropriate for the T and had it on the floor to the left and out of the picture. I'd never seen a large truck motor outside of the truck and was impressed by it's size.
Tags: Ohio Semi semi truck Sterling 1948 Sterling vintage truck antique truck rust rusty American Truck Historical Society ATHS HB600 Cummins 4x3 transmission historic truck big rig Explore in Explore camiones lorry
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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.]
Tags: 1942 Sterling HC144 Sterling concrete mixer Sterling truck George Edwards Edwards Concrete black and white B&W monochrome cement mixer historic Sterling truck vintage Sterling truck antique Sterling truck show truck big rig ATCA Antique Truck Club of America Macungie Truck show Macungie Pennsylvania Macungie Memorial Park chrome truck camiones lorry All types of transport
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Camp Washington neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. The female driver of this truck stopped at a convenience store to get something to eat. I tried to get her to pose with the truck, but I don't think she understood what I was asking her to do. She looked like a woman who had helped us pour some steps and a driveway at a Habitat house I was working on. That woman out worked all of us old geezers put together. YIKE!
Seeing a concrete truck that is all clean and polished almost never happens. This truck is more typical of what they look like.
Tags: Cincinnati Ready Mix Sterling concrete truck Sterling cement truck Camp Washington Cincinnati Ohio lorry camiones All types of transport
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Taken in the Dillonvale suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio.
The repaving going on in the neighborhood was interesting. An asphalt truck was attached to a spreading device that sprayed hot asphalt on the street. They were closely followed by a large gravel spreading vehicle with one of these gravel trucks backed against it which was supplying the spreader with the needed gravel. How the gravel truck driver was able to keep so close to the spreader and gage the correct amount of gravel to continuously supply is beyond me, but they did a masterful job. This truck at the bottom of a small hill was waiting it's turn to supply the needed gravel. I'm posting this picture rather than some others I took as it best shows the V shape of the bed. At the bottom of the V is a conveyer belt or something similar (perhaps an auger) used to move the gravel to the discharge point. I don't think the body tilts like a normal dump truck. Instead gravity pulls the gravel down to the bottom naturally.
The first time I remember seeing a truck like this was on a Habitat job I was working. We needed to get gravel between the foundation walls to the floor of the basement to provide a base for the concrete floor which was later poured. Unlike this truck, ours had a long conveyer belt arm on the back. The operator controlled the speed and direction of the belt to "sling" gravel over the foundation walls. The faster the belt ran, the further the gravel was flung. That way he could get a fairly even distribution of gravel in all parts of the basement rather than simply putting a large pile of gravel in one place and then have us distribute it by hand where it was needed which would have been a really tough job. Anyway, because of that experience, I've always called these trucks "gravel slingers".
From Wikipedia:
Sterling Trucks Corporation (commonly designated Sterling) was an American truck manufacturer. Founded in 1998, Sterling was created following the 1997 acquisition of the heavy-truck product lines of Ford Motor Company by Freightliner.[1] Taking its nameplate from a long-defunct truck manufacturer, Sterling was slotted between Freightliner and Western Star within the Daimler product range (later Daimler Trucks North America).
Introduced as a rebadged version of Ford Louisville/Aeromax product line, the Sterling product range was expanded in the 2000s with medium-duty (Class 5-7) trucks. After years of struggling to meet sales expectations, Daimler discontinued the Sterling Trucks line in 2009.
Headquartered in Redford Township, Michigan (Detroit), Sterling assembled its conventional-cab vehicles in St. Thomas, Ontario and Portland, Oregon. Sterling-brand trucks were sold in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand.
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