Deals on Wheels #464

filed it
back to shape
by hand!
It was still a tidy-looking
truck when George first
purchased it
George’s first
truck, the ever
popular big Benz
BUSH RESTO
Years of bush mechanics on the family
farm qualified Andrew for the task of
bringing life back into the old Mack and his
teenage enthusiasm took over, taking up the
challenge straight away.
“The flywheel housing had been loose on
the block, so I had to do a lot of welding, the
back of the block had cracked,” says Andrew
as he recalls the first job needed to resurrect
the Mack.
“So I welded the back of the block and filed
it back to shape, by hand.”
With the brakes and radiator fixed, the
single-drive tractor unit was put to work on
the farm, towing a bogie axle stock trailer.
Andrew always had plans to modify and
completely makeover the old Mack and it
wasn’t long before the old girl was parked
up, stripped back and new life added to it.
Actually, to be accurate, new chassis rails,
new heavier front axle, new bogie drive rear
end and new extra-long body was added in
order to give it new life. All this was done by a
very young Andrew and his mates. The bogie
drive came out of an old Flintstone.
“I had to get a new tail shaft and centre
bearing out of Truckline, which cost me
nearly $2,000, which I thought was a hell of a
lot of money,” Andrew recalls.
When you factor in that’s nearly 50 per cent
of what he paid for the truck, he’s right. But
the Mack needed the bogie drive, much like it
needed the heavier front end.
“The lightweight front axle just wasn’t
enough,” he tells me. The cracked chassis
rails indicate previous owners may not have
worried so much about front axle weights.
The next goal was a few cosmetic repairs.
“The cab had a little bit of rust in it. A mate
and I collected local sand and sand blasted
the cab,” he says. Yes, you read that right. After
drying the sand on some tin and using a sieve
to get rid of the larger grains, young Andrew
and his mate borrowed a compressor and
sand blasting unit in order to do the job
themselves. That’s inside and out mind you.
“The interior was painted that
Hammertone Green, it looked bloody awful,”
says Andrew. “It was all falling off it.”
With the exception of the hood lining the
whole interior was metal so it just got blasted
and repainted. The sand blasting removed
the dark green exterior colour that it was
when Andrew got it, as well as several other
coats – all the way back to the base red that
the truck had come out in. He then had a
friend remove the rust and, using two-pack
paint, he resprayed it Polar White.
All up, the transformation of the F-609
took Andrew around four to five years. Once
completed, the Mack spent another 20-plus
104