Another in a series of interviews with new Ford operators
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Fordeonvert
"The amount of work involved is incredible. Demolition, excavating, dumping, clearing, road-making, building—with all this, you've simply got to have tough vehicles. Reliable. With plenty ofground clearance.
"We've got 96 Fords in all, most of them D75o tippers, D5oos and D600s. Few of the tippers do more than 14,000 miles a year; but when you see the conditions they're working in—steep hills, craters, mud, rock—you realise the sort of punishment they take.
"Imagine the bashing ..."
"I've s een one tipper come in from a day's work with just 12 miles on the clock, including the trip to the site and back. Yet it had shifted heaven knows how many tons of rubble from one side of a road to the other. Imagine the bashing it got in loading alone. It takes a good truck to stand up to that kind of treatment. "Routine checks are all they need." "We do all our own servicing, and we like to keep as many tippers working at once as we possibly can. With the Fords it's easy; regular routine checks are all they need. And the tilt cab saves a lot of time."
The drivers like them, too Driver Stan Hilton says: "The cab's really something—most comfortable one I've sat in. There's a good view, bags of power, and with these big mirrors I don't have to hang out of the door when I'm backing up. And the body tips up good and high, too; makes my job much easier."