The day the duff went bang
Page 46
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
IT WAS late afternoon one Christmas Eve when I and my not-so-youthful eight wheeler came trundling home down the A5, towards London. Christmas Eve, and I still had some Christmas shopping to do!
I was then an owner-driver with just the one vehicle, and
took great pride in the fact that few roadside problems have ever stopped me from reaching home. My toolbox contained the sort of items one might expect an ex-fitter turned owner to carry with him; bits of wire, several reels of plastic tape, dozens of odd nuts and bolts, unions and nipples, and a substantial tool kit. I also carry a couple of good jacks.
In time, a driver becomes attuned to his vehicle, and so it was that as we trundled towards the foot of Brickhill that afternoon, I sensed that something was wrong around my double-drive back end.
The truck was empty, but as I climbed Brickhill I purposely used all the gears and opened the cab door so I could listen to the transmission noises. From somewhere there came an expensive sounding and unfamiliar graunching noise. It was at wheel-speed, so it had to be in the axles.
I pulled over to the layby at the top of Brickhill, got out and crawled underneath to check that nothing was loose.
I felt the brake drums to see if there was anything wrong there. Again nothing.
The noise was definitely coming from the rear-end and was at about wheel-speed. So with some trepidation, my hand touched the front diff-bowl.
Warm!' Then the rear bowl. Well, perhaps a bit warmer, but certainly not dangerously so.
1 sat for a few minutes contemplating what to do next and, unlike the man who drives someone else's lorry, I considered the chances of getting a replacement diff if I messed this one up, and the £1,000 or so that it might cost.
The answer was simple. I would not be able to get a diff over the holiday, and even if I could there were no spare £1,000s lying around for a new one.
My wife had long since learned that if I was late I was in trouble. If I was in danger the police would soon be in touch so, there was no need to phone home.
The next thing to do was find out exactly where the trouble was. There was plenty of dunnage on board and the first job a single-handed trouble shooter must do is make the vehicle safe by blocking all the wheels.
Once this was done I jacked up the rearmost axle so that both wheels were clear of the ground. From the pile of dunnage I selected a 6ft length of 2x2.
I then started the engine, selected second gear and very gingerly let in the clutch. The rearmost axle turned through the third cliff, and as soon as I could see the truck was not going to take off, I jumped down and went round the back.
Its surprising what you can hear through a length of timber, and sure enough, when my length of 2x2 was held against the diff bowl, and I rested my ear against the other end, there was my graunching noise. It was obvious that the crown wheel was riding high on the pinion over a fair portion of each revolution.
So, here I was, 60 odd miles from home and, if I wasn't going to get stung • for a ridiculous amount of cash and time, I had to devise some way of getting back to Essex.
Now. I was long enough in the tooth to have learned that a double-drive without at least a third-diff lock was less use than a single-drive. Even without today's sophisticated equip ment, I had on many occasions blocked-Op the driving axle on a single-drive eight-wheeler sufficiently to gain enough traction to overcome black-ice covered hilts.
When I bought my present eight-wheeler, I ensured that it had a lock on the third diff, and on this Christmas Eve that foresight was to pay off. Run ning empty — or laden for that matter — one drive-axle would do as well as two for the purpose of getting home.
Half shafts were stripped out of the rear axle and the inter-axle propshaft removed.
I packed up my gear, started up, popped in the inter-diff lock and off we went — home for Christmas, That year, Christmas Day was on a Friday, so when I stripped out the diff and found the off-side carrier-bearing minus a couple of balls, all it needed was a quick visit to my local friendly bearing stockist on the Monday.
That enabled me to rebuild a slightly marked, but otherwise perfectly serviceable, diff head in time for work on Tuesday morning — along with the rest of the competition.