So I have the stove, and now I have the saw, one thing is just leading to another. The fella that sold the saw is trying to sell his truck so he can go back home, and I'm considering buying it, and also considering that I might be a little nutso to consider it.
It's a flatbed, body is what passes for rusted around here (some holes in floorboards, bottom of the doors getting pretty flimsy), but to me, form follows function, and I couldn't care less about a little rust. He says that it starts right up at -40, runs strong, has good brakes, the tires look great, has a hauling bumper on the back, and he said that he ran a 4000 lb load a few hundred miles out of town last week without bottoming out the springs. It also has heavy-duty leaf springs on top of the other springs, but the support that runs from truck to h-d springs is not installed.
That's the good stuff. The bad stuff is that this truck has been around so long it came off the assembly line in the Nixon administration, it slurps down a $4 gallon of gas every 10 miles, and it's almost 40 years old. And I'm not a mechanic. But this thing looks like if you played with legos as a kid, you can work on it.
I've done stupider things than buying this truck, but they usually didn't work out so well either.
Here's my vision of how I would use it.
For the three or four times a year I really need a truck--refilling my propane bottle, hauling a vehicle out of a ditch, etc.
Hauling household water. I pay 8.5 cents a gallon for water, hauled in by tanker a couple of times a month. The service is great, but it's a big expense. I could haul it myself with this truck for 1.5 cents a gallon. That run would cost me $8 round trip, today's prices. If I hauled 500 gallons at a time, I'd save about $100 a month on water. If I combined that with a town run that I had to make anyway, say, drove it to work, it would save a little gas and a run on my car. I have a 250 gallon tank, would have to get another to make this worth the trip. Used tanks run about $1 a gallon, but hold their value if cared for. I figure if it ran water loads for a year, it wouldn't owe me a penny.
Hauling wood.
Any words of wisdom on this one? Opinions? Advice?
It's a flatbed, body is what passes for rusted around here (some holes in floorboards, bottom of the doors getting pretty flimsy), but to me, form follows function, and I couldn't care less about a little rust. He says that it starts right up at -40, runs strong, has good brakes, the tires look great, has a hauling bumper on the back, and he said that he ran a 4000 lb load a few hundred miles out of town last week without bottoming out the springs. It also has heavy-duty leaf springs on top of the other springs, but the support that runs from truck to h-d springs is not installed.
That's the good stuff. The bad stuff is that this truck has been around so long it came off the assembly line in the Nixon administration, it slurps down a $4 gallon of gas every 10 miles, and it's almost 40 years old. And I'm not a mechanic. But this thing looks like if you played with legos as a kid, you can work on it.
I've done stupider things than buying this truck, but they usually didn't work out so well either.
Here's my vision of how I would use it.
For the three or four times a year I really need a truck--refilling my propane bottle, hauling a vehicle out of a ditch, etc.
Hauling household water. I pay 8.5 cents a gallon for water, hauled in by tanker a couple of times a month. The service is great, but it's a big expense. I could haul it myself with this truck for 1.5 cents a gallon. That run would cost me $8 round trip, today's prices. If I hauled 500 gallons at a time, I'd save about $100 a month on water. If I combined that with a town run that I had to make anyway, say, drove it to work, it would save a little gas and a run on my car. I have a 250 gallon tank, would have to get another to make this worth the trip. Used tanks run about $1 a gallon, but hold their value if cared for. I figure if it ran water loads for a year, it wouldn't owe me a penny.
Hauling wood.
Any words of wisdom on this one? Opinions? Advice?
