Something different - WW2, 44 gallon drum loader

G'day, men! - Here's something you don't see every day, that would make a great addition to your old military rig!

A genuine WW2 (or maybe just post-WW2), Rosebery-engine-powered, Gilbert & Barker (later to become Gilbarco) .. 44 gallon drum loader .. complete with Garwood Olding hydraulic ram for its operating method!

Can't be too many of these left around anywhere! Fully towable, too! ..
Located in Toowoomba ..

cgi.ebay.com.au/WW11-44Gallon-Drum-loade...0QQitemZ180431636887

That's brilliant.

I wonder if Kurt Johannson used one given his drum collecting and use of surplus gear?

AW - I doubt it. The drum loader would have been a relatively rare piece of equipment, and a coveted item .. and I don't think there would have been too many sold as military surplus, until drums started fading out in favour of bulk fuel in the mid-to-late 1950's.

Old Kurt would have just manhandled them, I'd say. If he was lucky, he would occasionally have had a ramp to load from. Empties were a whole lot different loading proposition to full ones, but the old drums were still heavy, as compared to modern crap drums.

There are pics of ramps built by Cats during WW2 (when they had access to crawlers), and they then pulled the drums up the pushed-up ramp with the crawler, and from there, rolled them onto the truck.

Here's a pic of the regular loading process, when you never had a ramp .. just a couple of lengths of timber, and you were set ..



Here are pictures showing a later, simpler version of the drum loader, that was just a powered version of the inclined ramp .. I'd say this was a cheaper, and faster-to-build design, than the one on eBay ..





Here's a great pic of one of the fuel dumps in Australia, and the trucks lining up to load .. many of these drum depots handled between 3000 and 5000 drums a DAY ..



If you use the search term "drums", and "Second World War", on the following AWM search page, you'll get an idea of how drums were handled, and the sheer volume of drums during WW2.

Get a look at the stack of 52,000 drums in PNG .. and the the size of the drummed fuel dumps in Australia during WW2.

One part I found surprising, was that many drums were returned from the Pacific areas to Australia for reconditioning and re-use .. and they were often filled with water to be used as ships ballast. Because all the drums were galvanised 14g (2mm thick) steel, the water would have had no effect on their re-useability.

cas.awm.gov.au/PROD/cst.acct_master?surl...&bplatform=Microsoft Internet Explorer&bos=Win32

Cheers, OT, was thinking about the man-handling after I posted and how loaded Kirt's trucks were. Hard yakka and lots of it.

Filling up a Cessna in the blistering sun with a manual pump out of a drum is bad enough. Add some humidity and something bigger like a Beaufort on a remote strip (i.e.no mobile tank) and... tough blokes.

I know the owner of this drum loader, and he didn't sell it on ebay. It is still in his backyard. John told me the price is $1200, and it is located in Toowoomba. If interested, send me a message or email and I'll supply further information including photographs and contact details.

I was at a funeral in 2010 of a man who had started his WWII service in a service corps (RAAOC?). He was in charge of a depot in Sydney: fuel would arrive in drums and be offloaded, and then would be collected later by the various users. Lots of manhandling.
He thought that there had to be a better way, and came up with something simple. Every morning, when the delivery truck arrived, he had the regimental cook provide scones and jam to all personnel who were there at the time. The collectors of fuel arrived like cows to the milking, and the fuel went straight from the supply vehicle to the collection ones.
He didn't stay in the position for long. He drove two soldiers to the Empire air-training scheme entry test, and sat for it himself: he was selected, and they weren't. He became a navigator.

Roderick B Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor

Worked with a bloke once who used to wrap his arms around a full 44 on a truck & put it on the landing he was about 6'4'' & 20 stone never heard of him lifting one from ground level though. My father in law was in the islands during the war & spoke of handling 1000's of 44's, bloody hard yakka in the best of times, hats off to them all.

Graham

my father never worried much about drum lifters

he just used to pick up a 44 of diesel off the ground and up on to the back of an IH L-160

he wasnt a tall man nor that heavy, around 15st, just rather strong, as 1 chap found out 1 nite

I knew a dozing contractor from the Southern wheatbelt of W.A., who was built like the proverbial brick $h*thouse.
This bloke was only about 5' 9', but he was 3 axehandles across the shoulders, and had a chest like a 44 gallon drum.
I particularly remember his fingers were about an inch and a half thick (38mm).
He was renowned for being able to hoist a full 44 gallon drum from the ground, onto a ute tailgate, by himself.

He'd place a hand each end, hoist it off the ground like a weightlifter doing the first step of the "clean and jerk" .. then place it on top of his thighs (knees partly bent), as he kept lifting .. and then using his upper legs and hands combined, he'd thrust the drum upwards onto the tailgate. Some feat. 44 gallons (200L) of Diesel weighs 175kg, then you have another few kgs for the drum. Probably 180 kgs, easily.

I also recall a bloke from Kalgoorlie I worked with, on subbie tipper work. He had an R190 with a Cat 1100 series V8, pulling a tandem tipper.
He told us he was travelling down the hwy one day, and spotted a full 44 gallon drum of fuel that had fallen off a truck, and landed in the gutter.
He was only a little bloke .. and he said .."Ya know, I've never been able to lift a 44 before in my life .. but I managed to get that free drum of fuel into the tipper, all by myself, no worries!"

Filling up a Cessna in the blistering sun with a manual pump out of a drum is bad enough. Add some humidity and something bigger like a Beaufort on a remote strip (i.e.no mobile tank) and... tough blokes.

How about a DC3 in the tropics. Only good thing - it was pouring with rain (must have been in the arvo )