It was in 1973 when I first climbed up into a lorry cab but back then I had little idea that one day I would be expected to drive such a vehicle. It seemed an alien world, perched high above everyone in a box filled with unfathomable complexity. At 16, and on the first day of my working life, it just didn`t register that lorry mechanics would have to know how to operate the vehicles they worked on. I had turned up at the workshop, been given a pair of overalls and told I`d be attending college now and again. After being introduced to the foreman and the mechanic with whom I would be working, the long process of skill acquisition started and as the months past my mind became too engrossed in this new world of trucks and tools to worry about the future. In truth I didn`t know what had hit me. From the easy, smooth life of school I`d started up the mountain that was work. The company was a large haulage operator and its strangeness all but incarcerated me. I became so preoccupied with the intricacies of workshop procedure, its language and customs, I couldn`t think to the end of the week let alone years ahead when I would eventually be old enough to get a HGV licence. The journey was to be a long one and it started on that first day – the last time that my hands would be completely clean for years.
The lowest position in the workshop was that occupied by the `Boy`, and like it or not, I became the Boy. It was Boy get this and Boy do that, and if you didn`t, or you showed any sign of weakness, or just as bad, rebellion, then look out for your life would be made hell. The company started a new apprentice at the beginning of every year and each one took over the position of workshop Boy. So, for one year I had to endure – and prove myself. Whether you were being bullied or tested depended on who you spoke to. A trainee nurse friend of mine was so appalled at my treatment, she said that I should give up the job or I could be damaged for life. The other mechanics said that if I failed I would certainly be damaged for life – they`d see to it, personally. The best way to get through, I found, was not to stand still long enough to be a target. I ran every errand, literally. I worked non-stop leaving no time to worry or dwell on my plight. I threw myself at everything, leaving no room for hesitation or doubt – I compensated for lack of knowledge with shear enthusiasm.
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The hills seemed to come out of nowhere. I`d driven through Ilminster and knew that the road would soon carry me into Devon, a county of sandstone cliffs and hilly moorland, but I wasn`t expecting it to be so steep, not straight away. My lorry, an Atkinson Borderer, was fitted with a Roll Royce engine and Fuller range change gearbox and was well equipped, in most conditions, to deal with its 32 tons. I liked the Rolls but hadn`t yet seen it perform on anything like the hills we were approaching – it was my first long trip after getting my HGV licence.
The Black Down Hills stretch in a rough arc from North-West to South-East across the borders of Somerset, Dorset and Devon, acting like a barrier to be overcome, a warning that entry into the beautiful county of Devon must be earned. After the flat easy drive through Somerset I was suddenly presented with a climb. We rounded a left hand bend, one I was forced to slow for, and then the road reared-up in front – a long, steep incline to a another bend away in the distance.
I took as much of a run at it as I could, asking the wagon for everything it had got before I would have to change gear – something I wasn`t looking forward to. I didn`t think, I just charged at it. I hadn`t completely mastered the art of quick gear changing at that stage, matching road speed and engine speed was difficult enough on the flat, but now, with the lorry slowing rapidly and the engine revs dying, my trial began.
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The first lesson that all new Boys learnt was that tools were to be worshipped. When the Snap-on van did its round, arriving at our workshop on its weekly visit, we all climbed the steps to the rear doors, quietly queuing and then politely nodding to the salesman as we entered to pay homage. And once inside, amongst the rows of beautiful red tool cabinets and their smaller drawer boxes stacked on top, we were presented to the shiny little gods. We looked in wonder – and signed over great chunks of our wages. In the workshop, where the floor was swept clean but was always dirty, where trucks that had been steam cleaned always oozed oil and grease, and where everything you touched soiled your hands, our tools stood out. The red pillars and their precious contents were beacons of polish, cleanliness and care. Every time a tool was returned to a box after use, it was dutifully wiped with a rag and carefully put in its allotted place.
Tools, it is important to realize, are everything. Like controls – pedals, levers and the steering wheel - tools are a link between man and machine; without them the most skilled mechanic wouldn`t even be able to change a lamp bulb. And like controls, tools allow weak fleshy hands to manipulate great, heavy machines made of iron and steel. Tools turn bolts, nuts and screws, and with the right tool of sufficient leverage any mechanical object can be worked on, and made to work. Tools are sacred. Without tools oil would remain in the ground and metal would simply be something that made rocks glisten. They are the magic wands that conjure mechanisms and give life as we know it; and anyone who abuses them is not a craftsman but a fool – a lesson taught with great zeal in our workshop.
I had been told to remove a suspension leaf spring from the rear of a TK Bedford and was having difficulty with one of the U bolts. A mechanic came to assist me and placed a socket and his beloved Snap-on long shaft ½ inch drive ratchet on it, but it still wouldn`t budge. Without thinking, and in my usual rush, I decided to help it along with a club hammer. The mechanic looked at me with genuine sadness in his eyes. “You really shouldn`t have done that, Boy”, he said. In one corner of the workshop we had a gantry with pulleys and chains for lifting out truck engines. As I hung there, upside down, the foreman approached. He asked how long I`d been like that, with the chains biting into my ankles and blood rushing to my head. Ten minutes, he was told. He turned to the gathering crowd and announced that it was long enough, then looking at me with sympathy, he asked my crime. I related my mistake - and he went and fetched the hosepipe. “You need some sense washing into you, Boy”, he said. “Oil`s got to you – dermatitis of the brain. Tools are your life, Boy. Levers. Use a bigger, stronger lever. That`s what the three-quarter drive set is for. Think, Boy, think.”
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The lorry was slowing rapidly; the engine began to labour and the cab started to shudder. I dipped the clutch, pushed down on the range change button, put her in neutral and then revved the engine. When I pressed the clutch again and tried to get a gear the gearbox screamed in agony and the gearlever bounced against the palm of my hand, painfully. I`d missed my gear change. In a fit of panic to get another gear, I repeated the process but by this time we had almost stopped. I crashed her into first and let out the clutch; we crawled to the top, a journey that at a snail`s pace seemed never ending.
The Fuller nine-speed gearbox had a good spread of ratios to match torque with speed. The problem was that relatively low torque from the engine required frequent gear changes to maintain revs, gear changes that were not always easy to perform. Today, these old, non-synchronised gearboxes are called `constant mesh` and some people get a bit snotty if you use the slang term `crash-box`, but in truth, crash is a better way to describe them. Not just because, if you get it wrong, you are crashing the gears into use but because whether it uses synchronisers or not most of the gears in any gearbox, new or old, are in constant mesh. (Gearboxes use gears that run permanently mated.) But, the long and the short of it was, in a box without synchronisers changing gear was difficult for the inexperienced driver (me) and the quick changes needed on a steep incline became a nightmare.
A gearbox has an (input) primary shaft from the engine and clutch, a lay shaft (or counter shaft, as the Americans call them) and an (output) main shaft connected to the final drive. The primary and main shafts run in line, straight through the box, and although they are not connected directly, they are joined at different speeds by gears on the lay shaft. The lay shaft (the Fuller box had two, each running parallel with one another on either side of the primary and main shafts) has a fixed gear driven by a gear on the primary shaft and more gears, depending on the number of ratios the gearbox has to offer, fixed along its length. These further gears mesh with floating gears on the main shaft. A gear is engaged by locking one of the main shaft`s floating gears to the shaft itself. When this happens, drive is transmitted from the primary shaft, through the lay shaft, and to a gear locked to the main shaft. Meshed gears of different ratios run together between the lay shaft and the main shaft and by engaging and disengaging these, locking different sized gear cogs to the main shaft, the gearbox works.
`Working` the gearbox is another matter, though. To engage a gear, a dog-clutch splined to the main shaft and moved into position by the selector mechanism (from the gear lever) has to connect with dog teeth on a gear floating on the main shaft. In this way the gear is temporarily fixed to the main shaft and a ratio engaged. And here`s the rub – or crash, maybe – the dog-clutch being moved into position by the driver is spinning on the main shaft at road speed, the gear floating on the main shaft is being driven by the lay shaft at engine speed. To get its teeth to engage, the dog-clutch must rotate at the same speed as the main shaft gear, and without synchronisers matching gear speeds, the driver must do all the work – and that takes experience.
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The key to skill is experience. Once you`ve seen and done a bit, you can relax in a comfort zone created by familiarity. You don`t need to know everything, no one ever will, you just need to know enough to let you calm down and think. It`s then that your understanding of the concepts of how things work will allow you to look at any object and consider how it wants to work. You`ll be able to have a go at fixing anything, with confidence.
At the end of my first year a new Boy started and I was finding my feet. I`d passed my driving test and was allowed out in the service van with a mechanic on a few breakdowns. One day, though, when the workshop was plagued with a bout of influenza and a few of the mechanics were off sick, I was sent out on my own to attend a non-starter at a nearby warehouse. The truck had a Cummins engine that wouldn`t start despite turning over on the starter at a good speed. I quizzed the driver and found out that he had stopped the engine but tried to restart it immediately because he was being waved forward by a loader. Apparently, the driver had turned the ignition off and on again, simultaneously, in one movement.
I knew that Cummins used a pressure timed fuel system that needed a solenoid on the fuel pump to stop the engine. I found it by peering under the drivers wheel arch and, using a cab tilt bar like a snooker cue, I gave it a good knock. I heard a clunk. I asked the driver to try and start the engine - it fired up immediately. The solenoid, as I suspected, had stuck when the ignition was turned off and on again so quickly. When I got back to the workshop, after what seemed no time at all, ready to return to the fray and do my bit, I reported to the foreman telling him of my diagnosis, action and success. He didn`t look up from the job sheet he was filling out, and just said, “You`re not a complete twat, then”. I walked away elated. I`d been out on my own, worked without the knowledge that immediate help was on hand, solved a problem and been rewarded with a complement on my return – a first.
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We descended the first hill and rolled down through a tree lined cutting and crossed the border into Devon. The second hill hit us almost straight away, and this time I couldn`t see where it ended; the road was too winding for that. I decided not to let the revs drop – I would change down early and try to keep the engine at a point where it was developing enough power and torque to carry us up the hill at a reasonable pace. We began the ascent and as soon as the speed started to drop I went for a gear change. I had taken a run at the hill in top, so I decided on a block change to sixth. I took a fraction more time with the engine blip in neutral and then felt for sixth position, cupping the gearstick in the fingers of my left hand with more feeling than in the past. They found the spot and the gear lever dropped into place. Everything felt good: the frequency of the cab vibration soothed me; the engine sounded sweet; the gearbox whined a quiet and satisfying note between drone and squeal. She was happy. Bolstered by my success I went for a change into low range, this time to fourth. I missed it, but without rushing, I managed to get third. It was a good choice and one the old Atkinson obviously approved of. Another change to second not long after saw us to the top and through the Black Down Hills; and then safely, happily on towards Exeter.
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The day couldn`t be better. I was twenty-one years of age and a newly qualified HGV Class One driver. I had finished my apprenticeship a year since and was working among the middle ranking mechanics – still learning but not fazed by any job that came into the workshop. The Boy had been bleeding the PAS on a DAF 2300, in the workshop, but instead of using a drain pipe so he could re-use the fluid, he`d allowed it to spill out all over the workshop floor. The place was covered in an oily, dark viscous liquid. I was looking at his frightened face pondering what to do. I should have held him down in all that fluid, until the oil soaked down to his body and he was as black as the earth; a reminder that machines separate us from a world that was the mess on the workshop floor. I should have told him that every job has a right way to do it, even if not an obvious one; that machines need our skill to work them and without it they would soon be useless; and, of course, that he should think more about how things work.
But I didn`t; I was too wrapped-up in my own thoughts. I had in my hand some delivery papers and I was overjoyed. I`d asked the boss, now that I`d passed my HGV licence, if I could go on the road for a bit and he had agreed to my request. The following day I was to take a load down to Exeter, in Devon. I`d be using one of the Atkinsons, the one with the Rolls Royce engine and Fuller, nine-speed gearbox.
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