Lots of gears, and really slow speeds! I worked on a big Ford grain truck once, a 1951 F-8 or bigger with about a 24-foot box and dual rear axles, IIRC, with a Lincoln flathead V-8 engine, a 5-speed main transmission, a 3-speed Brownie, and a manual-shift 2-speed rear end. I've seen pics of trucks like that, and the early semis, pulling the Grapevine hill with the drivers standing out on the running board steering through the window to get away from the heat inside the cab. The truck was running 3 or 4 MPH with the hand throttle set wide open, in whatever gear it needed to pull the hill. My grandfather hauled cases of bottled beer from Milwaukee to Nashville after Prohibition was repealed on a couple of 34 Chevy stake-body trucks with what was probably the old 207 engines. They were slow, but they got the job done! One truck would pull hills much better than the other one for some reason. On a particular hill in Kentucky, the sheriff would stop any truck that had to go to first gear to pull the grade, and weigh it. The sluggish truck would get a legal load, and crawl up the hill. While it was pulled over being weighed, the other one with the big overload would sail on by in 2nd. gear! They got caught and fined eventually, but they made a lot of trips up that hill with an overload before that happened!
Jerry
Last edited by Hotrod Lincoln; 02/21/2010 1:43 AM.
