 
A fleet of Econo-packer front end loaders in use by the Los Angeles School District during the late 1950's, and built by the S. Vincen Bowles Company in nearby Sun Valley. Note the third truck from the left is a White 3000 with straight lift arms, while the others are Internationals with OTC arms. SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2006 UPDATE
UPDATE FOR SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2006 In this edition, CRT proudly presents a fantastic collection of photos that have probably not seen the light of day in over four decades, displayed in the newest album titled The Bowles Dealer Album. This collection comes from an old home-made sales album used by a Colorado Bowles dealer and dates from the 1956-60 period, a time when the company had just started to build their landmark compaction front loaders. Even knowing what we do about Bowles, there were a lot of surprises here; they were a small but innovative builder and offered quite a wide variety of equipment even in their earliest days, and you will see a good sample of their product lineup in from these golden years. This is CRT's second major collection of original factory photos, following on the heels of Michel Ferro's outstanding KUKA Album in the previous edition. Most of the images used in earlier CRT albums are from old advertising, and are of a somewhat lesser quality. With this latest album, you will see these rare, classic trucks in stunning clarity as they were scanned from the original photographic prints. The acquisition of this collection was quite by chance, and it is indeed fortunate that we have such a group of images from this small independent builder that contributed so much to the development of the front loading refuse truck. THE 1000 MARK With a bunch of new members signing on recently, the CRT Member's Area at MSN groups has seen another phenomenal period of growth, now well over one hundred members strong. Along with this increase, the photo collection here easily shattered the the 1000 mark during August, ( 1248 by the latest count! ) making this far and away the best place on the web to view and post refuse truck and related pictures. Best of all, this is an open forum, not limited strictly to the 'classics'. You may post pictures of the truck you drove last week, or a truck driven decades ago. Toys and models are also a fair topic, and there is a discussion board open to all members. Membership is free, but applicants must include a few words about why they wish to join. This is not a quiz meant to complicate life, but is to try and weed out those who attempt to join these lists in order to send junk email to its members. I have had to reject some applications for failure to include this, but those persons are welcome to reapply following these guidelines. For example, you might add a line as simple as "I'm interested in refuse equipment" so that I know you're not a spammer. Other than this, members are free to give as much or as little personal information as they see fit, though it would be nice if you could add your country of residence. There have been some problems reported with the MSN site, most notably a condition whereby the 3MB picture storage space allotted to each member appears to be full, even before having added many pictures. For technical issues such as this, contact MSN's help service directly. They have reportedly been pretty good about resolving this problem. As the list moderator, I can manage the MSN site, but I can't do much with the "mechanics" behind it. ANOTHER "1000" MARK Of the many new photos posted recently, one in particular jumps out as a significant find. Dana Gregory posted this picture of the Gar Wood "Ten Hundred" rear loader in one of his albums, which is an extremely rare truck.  The Ten Hundred was the creation of Gar Wood's chief designer Fred Smith, and the first patents were filed around 1977. It featured a continuous cycling, folding packer panel which was powered by only two hydraulic cylinders. The curved side body, which helped to reduce the unladen weight was a major design advance and has become an industry standard in recent years. It is unclear if Gar Wood ever offered the Ten Hundred for sale in North America, but Dana's original sales brochure would seem to indicate that it at least came close, and there were almost certainly demonstrator units used in trials. Gar Wood's parent company folded the division in the late 1970's, and sold off the rights to their product line to other manufacturers both in the US and around the world. Our European members may recognize this truck as their own Europress LP-1000, produced under license by KSG during the 1980's, but now out of production. Sincere thanks to Dana for posting this very rare image of "The Last Gar Wood".
"POD" PEOPLE A few months back, there was a short discussion on the board about and unusual front loader with a detachable body known as the Heil POD. Some retired trucks had appeared for sale by various Waste Management divisions across the United States, but not much was really known about them. Well it turns out that Bruce Polit, a regular contributor to this site knows a quite a bit about this unusual truck: 
Bruce added that these trucks "...also had a crusher panel located inside the hopper to crush bulk items down, so the packer ram could move it into the body." Finally, as for their eventual fate he says "Waste Management converted the trucks to recyclers by placing a divider through the center of the truck. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe WM owned the rights to that truck. Since WM sold out I haven't seen those trucks anymore." Though somewhat popular in Europe, the detachable body refuse truck is a rarity here in the USA. Many thanks to Bruce for shedding some light on this neo-classic refuse truck. THE LAST DAYS OF DEMPSTER The Dempster Album at CRT was expanded and updated earlier this year with much detail of the company's early history. Marc Micheli of California sent along some new details of the brand ownership just prior to the end. Mark, whose ad agency handled the account during the nineties writes: "After Krug International, while the company was in fact relocated to Toccoa, Georgia, it was actually Wastequip who bought Dempster and named it "Dempster Inc". During this time the corporate identity was tagged as a Wastequip Company. It was also during this era that Dempster was an innovator in recycling bodies and truly took the lead in that regard. My father's agency (I wasn't with the firm yet) was very active with Dempster and Wastequip during this period, with the clients investing lots of money in both R&D and marketing. "When Wastequip dropped Dempster in the '90s, Toccoa Metal Technologies (TMT) was organized, so the legal name had to be changed again. TMT named the company 'Dempster Equipment'. By this point we had lost the account as the new organization brought in new people. The company was experiencing problems at this time, as your story states. At one point, the owners made management changes and brought back the previous president, who subsequently brought our agency back into the fold. Unfortunately, they did not inform us about the extent of their financial problems. If they had, we surely would have made different decisions on their marketing. Only when they stopped paying their bills did we find out something was seriously wrong. That's when the "outside group of investors" came in for the eleventh hour attempt and that was our final chapter with Dempster (we had no involvement with the last management team)." Many thanks to Marc for passing along this information. It is interesting to note that Wastequip recently acquired McClain Industries container and roll-off division, but not the E-Z Pack refuse body division which was part of McClain. (E-Z Pack was sold separately to Clean Earth Environmental LLC of Kentucky). Perhaps Wastequip's experience with Dempster had "soured" them on the business of building front/rear loader refuse bodies. COLLECTORS CORNER The 5th edition of CRT Collectors Corner. is now online, and starts off with another stunning group of models from Pierre Collette from Quebec, who hand-builds replica bodies on standard model truck kit chassis. The trucks shown in this latest group are built in 1/24 scale. Pierre is a former driver, and once operated a Heil Mk.V in the early 1980's, and remarks that it was "..as good a garbage box as Heil has ever built". Indeed, the Mark V was Heil's premium bulk packer in the 1970's, and featured a unique variable-geometry telescopic packer system that combines features of both the swing-link and slide-sweep methods. The Mark V was dropped from the Heil lineup in North America when the rights to build what had been the Gar Wood LP-900 design were acquired about 1979-80. These big Heils have all but vanished from north America in the quarter-century since production ceased, so it's nice to see yet another Mark V model from Pierre as well an excellent Mark III and some other great contemporary models. Pierre also has some of his creations available for sale, which are also pictured in the Collectors Corner. Anyone who may be interested in owning one should contact Pierre directly.[Sold/NLA 12/06] I also received some pictures from Bob Scribner of Granite State Collectibles (GSC), of New Hampshire who sent in some samples of GSC's working Leach 2RII body, which is custom crafted with functional parts and mounted on the First Gear Models Mack MR cabover. A conventional Mack chassis is also available, and a single axle version on a IHC chassis is coming soon. These appear to be of outstanding quality, and would certainly compliment any collection. For additional cost, GSC can produce these in colors of your choosing. Check out their website in the above link for details on all of GSC's extensive catalog. Also checking in was Tim Byrne, whose credentials as a refuse truck fanatic are without question. Tim has recently acquired yet another model, a newly released 1/50 scale Volvo by MOTORART, equipped with a Norba MF300 split-body rear loader. For More details, see the Motorart website and look up item # 15323. Tim also sent in another link for Panaos, a Cypriot refuse truck manufacturer who build an interesting variation of the Dempster Route King type rear loader which has pusher type cylinders powering the upper packing blade. This link may be found at the Industry Links page maintained here at the CRT website, which features manufacturers from around the world. THE SHELVOKE CONNECTION Lest I forget, the latest edition of the Enthusiasts Club Magazine is now available on Brian's Carpenter's Unofficial Shelvoke & Drewry Website. There is an interesting article on the second generation Fore & Aft tipper, and how it came to be, as well as several other interesting, and amusing stories! REFUSE TRUCKS ON FILM And finally, I have added two new titles to the CRT Films Page, courtesy of CRT-MSN member westernwaste. Fittingly enough for this edition, one of them is a Twilight Zone TV episode from 1960 feating a Bowles front loader ! In fact the truck pictured appears to have been an actual Culver City truck which appeared in a magazine article the previous year. The magazine photo of this truck is on page 7 of the Bowles Dealer Album as mentioned at the top of this page. Eric Voytko, September 3, 2006 
© 2006 Eric Voytko All Rights Reserved Logos shown are the trademarks of respective manufacturers Photos from factory brochures/trade advertisements except as noted |