How lite is Liteweight ?

JOHN.K. wrote:

GM V 71 engine blocks .

I never new GM made aluminium, was this a common thing ? A old Cummins NH type of motor was the same weight almost as a 671 GM, to heavy to drop on my foot

Anyway this kinda surprised me when I learnt this years ago

Paul

Paul, used to see ads for Tow Operators with low tare prime movers, back in the 1980's or so.
Think some Louisvilles, Whites, IH and possibly KW units came in at about 7 1/2 tonnes.
Very minimal gear, no sleeper, small tanks and lighter motors like the V692.
Payload extra 2 or 3 tonnes paid on long runs, stuff the driver! Just a memory, Paul.

Paul thats nice and lite, did/does Kenw6have aluminium cabs ? If so were they standard or optional, I know little about this, I looked at buying a Peterbilt maybe 6 or 7 years ago and it had alloy cab and rails, a old cab over with a bunk, dunno about the cross members, I seem to recall they were as well, tthe ass end and front axle and pretty much the entire running gear had been changed

So back onto aluminium engine blocks, Google wasnt much help except it showed 6V53 alloy blocks

Does anyone know what other sizes were available and or other brands like Cummins
Gardner had alloy blocks but they weighed as much as big Cam Cummins still

Paul

Err..... Gardner had iron cylinder blocks, it was the crankcases that were aluminium.

Thanks for the clarification there

Paul

Remember seeing some of the build sheets ( prolly on here) , for both cabover and conventional Pete's, reckon maybe 50% of those bought in were originally alloy chassis.
Also reckon that of these, most would have been rebuilt with replacement steel rails, either when being extended, converted into bogie drives or when come to grief after accidents.

The late Ted Ferguson of Narellan had two sets of alloy rails squirrelled away in his shed, one set for the cabover bogie drive, other for that exAFL single drive " cemterpede" that had the R170 axle with both pusher and lazy, air lifted.
Dave_64

You could get ally Hendricksons too,White always had them with big rubber bushes in sort of barrels as springs.(Velvetride)....but the ally beams were notorious for breaking,and had the be checked all the time for nicks and scrapes on the underneath ,as cracks would develop quickly.........oddly ,the most reliable beam out of steel,all,and cast iron was the cast iron one ....a cracked iron beam would keep going for years sometimes .

One strategy was to run a single drive with air bag dual pusher.

Overlander is compiling his brochure collection for future posting.
Be interesting to see which prime movers were lighter builds.

KW choice
Steel frame cab or AluminiumThinks all the early KW th@ came to Australia were steel frame cabs
All of the Ansett 'S' model Kenworth were shipped as deck cargo and all of them rusted @ the rear top corners of the cab
as it was rounded corners they all rusted there later in life


FWIW



cya