The truck pictured is one of the big boys. Only the version with three axles can carry 10 tons (L 10.000, successor of the L 8.500). This one has already the cab of 1938, without any percentage of wood (all steel), with rounded corners and edges. It has long ago pneumatic tyres, which incidentally allow a further slight increased speed. Typically will be from now on for a long time the Trilex rims, where one brings out not the tyre from the rim, but the tripartite rim and the star from the tyre.
It is the time in which the truck engineering changes fundamentally. In addition to the three-axle possibly with two tiltable boxes, the body entirely made of steel and the first semi-trailer trucks, there are besides gasoline also diesel six-cylinder engines with far more than 10 liters of displacement. The truck program really fills each gap and the indication of the payload must be graded finer, to distinguish them all from each other.
To the driver (women should have been already trained especially), the handling of this vehicle ask superior requirements. Thereby can even the attempt to solve the mechanical hand brake, the whole project bring to failure. Once estimate the already remarkable weight for an empty vehicle on the front axle and forget all nowadays usual auxiliary equipments.
The steering will be a little smoother, if one may take the word in this context even in the mouth, by more play and a relatively large transmission ratio. The former makes driving long distances not just for fun. Look at old movies where the steering wheel in cars constantly will be directed back and forth. If you now even consider, that you can steer when maneuvering only while driving or rolling, you even need to hurry enormous with great translation or the vehicle move several times forward and backward.
Frail a truck driver may not be, and that not only when changing tires. Who lived earlier at the beginning of a road leading uphill, will be familiar with the eternal double-clutch, partly several times in the same vehicle because the bloody gear does not work. Meanwhile, the speed dropped so much that one must take of the next lower. And that possibly with two gearshift levers and eight-speed.
Look up at the top speed, pull off a certain value, noting that the highway construction has just begun. Under the conditions to be a truck driver, with today's standards can be no longer measured. What do you mean, how many weak-motorized vehicles and horse-drawn vehicle there, where you get certainly difficulties to overtake with the shown above truck.
we will not even mention here the driving comfort on long distances. 6.5 tonnes permitted payload leave not much leeway for a comfortable spring system. And smooth roads are rare, cobblestones even possible on country roads. There is no heating and one still do not need, at least in summer, undershirt or bare upper body is almost the rule. Of the remaining engine emissions such as diesel smell and noise, we want prefer to remain silent here and put a monument to the truck driver of the thirties. 03/09
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