 
Early Sicard 
Canadian Arthur Sicard began building truck-mounted snow blowers in Quebec during the mid 1920's. Working out of a shop in Montreal, his equipment earned a reputation for strength and longevity, and even today Sicard snow blowers are a familiar sight at airports as well as the highways of snow-bound northern cities. By the end of World War II, Sicard had opened a U.S. facility at Watertown, in upstate New York. A 1953 advertisement pointed out that every Sicard Snowmaster ever built was still in service at that time!
Like any good entrepenuer, Sicard may have been inspired to enter the refuse truck business by the appearance of Load-Packers in great numbers in Montreal, that city being an early fleet buyer of Gar Wood's famous refuse truck. Irenee Sicard, also of Montreal and possibly a relation, filed a patent for a rear loading refuse collector in 1943, (see illustration) assigning it to Arthur Sicard. At a time when factories were engaged in war production, it is unlikely that more than a handful, if any of these were ever built. Irenee Sicard's 1943 design is a noteworthy in that it featured ejection unloading by means of moveable partition within the body, the first time such a feature was proposed on a rear loading refuse truck. This track-guided, angled ejector panel very much resembled the type commonly used on modern designs. The ejector was powered by a hydraulic cylinder acting against fixed cables through pulleys. This arrangement, sometimes called a "reeving hoist", doubled the effective stroke of the cylinder. The reeving hoist was a common to early hydraulic dump trucks, and was used to operate the trough on the Colecto side loader. Modern trucks use them for overhead hoists on rear load container lift systems, as well as on roll-off bodies. A second track guided the loading scoop, which traversed the length of the body, from rear to front and back again, to compress each hopper load directly against the forwardly positioned ejector. Irenee Sicard had come very close to inventing the modern high compaction rear loader a full seventeen years early! When modern-type high compaction rear loaders first appeared in the 1960's, they merely positioned the ejector rearward during initial packing cycles, using the compressed load to force it forward as the body filled. Both the scoop and the ejector panel were powered by the same single-cylinder reeving hoist, with de-clutching means provided for each component. This early design had one more distinct feature, a multi-angled guideway to control the scoop movement (via guide rollers) within the hopper area. This method of controlling the movement of the packing panel was later used with much success by Cyril Gollnick on his in his famous Leach Packmaster five years later. Whether or not it was actually built, it was soon eclipsed by a more modern refuse truck in 1945, the work of yet another Montreal inventor. 
11/6/04 © 2004 Eric Voytko All rights reserved Photos from factory brochures/advertisements except as noted Logos shown are the trademarks of respective manufacturers |