by Ed Miller
Maintenance of each tractor was complete only when its fifth wheel received the proper amount of grease. A tractor’s fifth wheel is really not a wheel at all. It is the apparatus attached at the rear tractor frame that allows the tractor to connect to a trailer. To hook to a trailer, a tractor backs under a trailer and the trailer’s king pin slides into the groove in the fifth wheel. The king pin causes the fifth wheel’s locking mechanism to engage, which keeps the trailer hooked to the tractor. Fifth wheels need lubrication so trailers can turn smoothly. If they don’t have enough grease, you need to apply more. If there’s too much grease, scrape some off and put it on the fifth wheel of another tractor. If you put too much grease on a fifth wheel, it would get scraped off when the tractor hooked to a trailer, and this excess grease would hang around and eventually bite you. It either fell onto the truck frame, which meant you got it all over your clothes when you greased the truck the following week, or it would fall on the ground and you’d step in it. It also happened that you hardly ever realized you had stepped in it until you either climbed up into the tractor and saw it cover the accelerator, brake, and clutch pedals, or you carried it into the house and ruined the carpet. We had to learn to do things Obie’s way, which included a strict fealty to “just the right amount.”
Back then we didn’t know much about the effect of petrochemicals on the environment. Obie did, however, have a system for recycling used motor oil. After each oil change, we would pour the used oil into fifty-five gallon drums. When a drum was full, Obie would attach his homemade drip pipe to the drum, affix this to the back of the Farmall M farm tractor, and then spread the oil on the dusty gravel and dirt roads of his 168 acres. This kept the dust down, and when traffic traveled those roads or paths, the roads would get packed down and often ended up looking like they were paved with asphalt.
As part of our work, we would hook just-serviced tractors to trailers and take them to the shop, where we would check lights, tires, mud flaps, brakes, and roofs (just to make sure a driver hadn’t “forgotten” to mention hitting something and tearing a hole in the roof). The repair of a burned-out light could be as simple as replacing a bulb or as involved as replacing an entire length of corroded wiring, from the front of the trailer all the way to the rear. If there were rusted screws, it could prevent a marker light from maintaining a proper ground, so you would have to scrape rust away from the frame and replace the screws with new ones. Marker lights are small lights on the front, rear, and sometimes sides of vehicles, and they usually work when headlights are turned on.
It’s a wonder my brothers and I didn’t get killed changing tires. We didn’t have air impact wrenches, which use air pressure to loosen the lug nuts, which hold the lug fasteners that secure the tires, so we had to begin the process by breaking the lug nuts using a lug wrench and a three-foot-long bar. We would then jack up the wheel, hoist it, and put a heavy piece of wood under the jack, so the jack would not sink into the dirt or gravel and there’d be some stability. The long bar provided the extra leverage needed to loosen the very tight lug nuts. After removing the lugs and lug nuts, we would place the three-foot-long bar under the tire, and pull it in such a way that it raised the tire an inch off the ground, allowing us to pull the outer tire off the drum and roll it out of the way. After removing the spacer, a four-inch wide steel ring used to separate the tires, the process was repeated with the inner tire.
Using a valve change tool, we would remove the tire valves—which let air in and out—to let air out of the inner tube; unfortunately for us, tubeless tires had not yet been invented. Once the tire was completely deflated, the real fun began. The tire rims, on which tires were mounted, were comprised of three pieces and referred to as split ring rims. The largest was similar to the tire rim on a car, and there were two narrow rings that fit over the end of the rim, which essentially made it one rim. A combination of differently shaped tools was needed to break loose the rings to separate the rims from the tires, and often included a sledgehammer. Separating the rims from the tires sometimes required a hell of a lot of effort due to rust buildup. The rims were made of steel and if one had not been broken apart for a long time, it had likely rusted so badly that it had become more like one piece than three pieces.
After removing the two narrow rings, you would then lift one side of the tire to remove it from the larger rim. One of the tire tools had a flat one-and-a-half-inch wide blade on one end. After working the tool’s flat end under the inner ring, you could hold the ring up until you placed another tire tool next to it. Then, using both tools in somewhat of a leapfrog fashion, you could eventually get the inner ring to release from the outer ring. There were times that required placing the flat end under the inner ring, prying up the ring, and then beating the hell out of the flat end as you worked it around the ring.
With the inner ring removed, you would lift off the outer ring, and then lift one side of the tire to remove it from the rim. Once again, if rust had formed on the rim next to the tire, things were more difficult and a bit of dexterity was required. Standing the tire up on its tread, you would have to hold the tire with one hand while you swung a sledgehammer with the other. Of course, your goal was to hit the rim hard enough to break the rust away from the tire. It usually took just a few well-placed blows to separate the rim from the tire. When you finally got the tire off the rim, you would remove the hard rubber flap, which provided a protective barrier between the tube and the rim, and then you could pull the deflated tire tube from inside the tire. My brothers and I had quite a few laughs watching one another swing the sledgehammers. When you missed the rim and accidentally hit the side of the tire, the hammer would bounce off the rubber and back at such a speed that it would fly out of your hand.
Regardless of the reason for changing a tire, whether it was flat or worn out, it had to be reassembled using a tube and a three-piece ring. To do this, you would place a new tube, or a patched one if the tube was in good enough shape to be reusable, inside the tire and, in the process, make sure there were no foreign objects in there. If there was a flat tire in which we were unable to locate a nail or screw, we would rub its inside with a piece of cheesecloth, which would snag and identify the culprit. If the size of the hole in the tire tube was so small that we couldn’t find it, we would overinflate the tire tube and then use a soapy rag to coat the tube. The leak would cause the soapy water to bubble, and then it could be identified and patched.
After placing either a repaired or new tube into the tire, and then the flap, the tire would be placed over the rim. The outer ring would then be set on the rim, and the smaller ring placed inside the first ring. Using a sledgehammer, the rings were beaten into position (or submission). Sometimes, however, one or both of the rings would just refuse to seat properly. This would become very clear during inflation, after a new tire valve was inserted and tightened, when—and usually without any warning that it was about to happen—both rings would explode off the wheel at an alarmingly high speed.
The split ring rims were also known as “widow makers,” or “suicide split rims,” and older drivers might remember how dangerous they could be. Once, when I was traveling cross-country in a Chevrolet Camaro with a friend, we stopped for gas at a truck stop in Utah. Since this was back in 1970, medieval times, attendants pumped gas for patrons, and while sitting by the pumps, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a young man inflating a truck tire with a three-piece rim. The guy was sitting on the edge of the tire while using his hand to hold the air hose onto the valve. As I turned to tell my friend that the fellow should inflate the tire differently, we heard a loud bang. I got out of the car and saw that the rim had broken apart and the young man’s arm was badly broken. I’m sad to say that I also know of a company that had a tire changer killed when a separated rim blew him up into the rafters of the building in which he was working.
Because Obie knew the danger of these rims, he taught us to lay a heavy steel bar on top the air hose to h
old it in place, turn on the compressor, and then get the hell out of the way. He eventually welded steel tubing together to make a cradle that held each tire while it was inflating. For obvious reasons, other tire changing facilities also made tire cages part of their standard operating equipment.
After a tire was inflated, and before a valve cap was screwed onto the valve, the final test was to cover the top of the valve with an extremely high-tech liquid: your own spit. If the saliva didn’t bubble from the air pressure, then you knew the valve was properly tightened. Looking back, I suppose it might have made better sense to use some of the same soapy water we used on the tire tubes, but the spit method was more fun. We would then roll the first tire to the brake drum, place the long bar under the tire, and raise the bar while, at the same time, pushing the top of the tire onto the brake drum. After sliding the tire all the way back into position, we placed the four-inch spacer on the drum, then used the same method to place the outside tire on the drum. After inserting the lugs into the bolts attached to the drum, we would finish by placing the lug nuts. We’d hand-tighten them to stay in place, and then using the four-pronged lug wrench and the long bar, we would tighten them further, alternating from side-to-side, until all nuts were moderately secure.
Obie insisted that all tires, whether on tractors or trailers, be perfectly balanced. Wobbling caused tires to wear out more quickly, the steering wheel to shimmy, and the cab to shake, and also produced an aggravating road noise, the sound the vehicle makes as it travels. There isn’t a single trucker older than fifty-five who hasn’t observed another driver trying to hold onto a steering wheel as it shimmied because of unbalanced steering-axle tires. Chances are that most truck drivers have experienced it firsthand. I know I have.
Back then we didn’t have the type of lug-less wheels that don’t need balancing, like there are today, so we learned Obie’s art of tire balancing. As there was a hole in the middle of the four-pronged lug wrench, we would insert the three-foot-long bar through the hole and then with the lug wrench standing up on two legs, insert one end of the bar into the hole. The other end would rest on the ground, which held the wrench in a slanted position (resembling the jacks of the children’s game). The tip of the bar would be placed against one side of the tire. As we rotated the tire, the bar would show which section of the tire was out of balance, because there would either be space between the tire and the tip of the bar or the tire would push the tip of the bar out of the way. By tightening the lug nuts at the location where the tire tool was pushed away, we would continue rotating the tire while tightening however many lug nuts were needed to achieve a perfectly balanced tire. Of course, this made us feel accomplished. Plus, we wouldn’t get one of Obie’s ass chewings.
My brothers and I could expect to receive an ass chewing when we either did something stupid, such as putting too much oil in an engine due to losing count of the number of cans we’d opened, if we goofed off more than we worked, or if we committed the error of forgetfulness. Obie was usually a patient instructor when he taught us the mechanical necessities of keeping tractors and trailers in tip-top shape, or the proper way to hook the milking suction apparatuses to cows, or how to ride a horse, or how to cut, bale, and stack hay, but then, it was up to us, and in our best interest, to remember what we’d been taught. He would ream us out if we forgot the right way of doing a job.
All of Obie’s tractors were equipped with a tire jack, a tire tool, a heavy piece of wood, and at least one mounted spare tire, which was carried in the spare tire rack under each trailer. Back then it was common practice for a driver to change his own flat tire. In the event that one of Obie’s drivers sustained two flat tires (assuming the incident happened within four hundred miles of home), Obie wouldn’t pay what he called “highway robbery” by covering the cost of a driver purchasing two tires while on the road, and would instead load two tires into the trunk of my grandmother’s Cadillac, strap down the trunk, and haul ass to Kentucky or Tennessee. She gave Obie hell when he used her brand-new Cadillac Sedan DeVille for loading tires just two days after he gave it to her as a birthday gift.
Worn-out tires usually got hauled off to the county dump, but my brothers and I had our own ways to get rid of them. We would hook three tires together with a chain and use the Farmall M to drag them several hundred yards to the top of a hill where the hayfield met woods. At this juncture, a road cut through the trees and wound down for about three-quarters of a mile, stopping at a forty-acre delta field at the flank of the Catawba River, and we’d roll them down the road.
Heaven only knows how many truck tires are still in those woods, because we had countless contests to see who could roll their tire farthest. The tires gained a lot of speed as they headed down toward the first curve, and due to that curve having enough banking, the majority of the tires made it through the curve without toppling over. After the tires went out of sight, we listened to them make their final revolutions as they tore through, or tore down, the rhododendrons, bushes, and small trees. Some tires rounded several curves and traveled impressive distances. The tires that fell on the first curve—or before reaching it—lived a second life because we retrieved each one and helped it finish its run.
I’m certain we must have sent more than one hundred tires down that winding road. We should have gone into the woods and retrieved them, but we had other contests to win and lose, so we mostly forgot about them. After Obie and my grandmother passed away, the farm was sold, and I have often wondered what the new landowners thought about all those tires in their woods. Did the woods become a garbage dump? Did flooding cause the tires to float around the woods? Whatever thoughts they had, or may still have, I would wager that no one has figured out that all those tires are there because of three brothers and their adolescent games.
In the years before Obie began installing engine block heaters, the bitter cold of winter made it a difficult time to maintain the tractors and trailers. When it was very cold, an engine’s motor oil became so thick that it was damned near impossible for the batteries to crank the trucks. Obie, however, was not one to be foiled by the elements, so he employed his homemade engine warmers. To make the warmers, he used an acetylene-cutting torch to cut the middle out of used fifty-five gallon steel oil drums, leaving eight inches on both the top and bottoms of each drum. We would then pour several inches of diesel fuel, kerosene, into each drum, and then place a rag into the fuel, making sure a small portion of each cloth was sitting above the liquid. Too much rag caused a hotter fire and a big flame that would melt some of the rubber hoses. After sliding a drum under a truck’s oil pan, we would light the cloth and let the heater go to work.
Obie’s method worked extremely well, and it took no more than twenty minutes to heat the oil warm enough for the truck to start. The biggest drawback to using these warmers was the soot that found its way into each truck cab. We quickly learned to take a hot, wet, soapy rag with us when we jumped up into each truck to start it, and Obie’s drivers were very appreciative that we cleaned the steering wheels and seats before they arrived to leave for their trips.
We also had occasions when we had to deal with trucks that wouldn’t start because of faulty air starters, which were more popular back in the day and used compressed air instead of an electric motor to start an engine. The air starters worked well when air pressure didn’t leak out of the vehicle’s reserve tank, but in the sixties and seventies, small-scale trucking hardly ever ran smoothly, and air leaks were a common occurrence. When a truck wouldn’t start because compressed air leaked from the tank, we used one of two methods to crank the engine. The first was to pull another tractor close enough to hook both tractors’ glad hands (air hoses) together. Akin to sharing the air from your diving tank with someone who has lost their oxygen, this method would provide enough air for the air starter to do its job. If this exchange of air proved unsuccessful, another method was executed that made use of “the hill” on Obie’s farm.
The hill was an extension of Obie’s driveway: four acres of grass and hard-packed slick red clay. When Obie owned just a few tractors, they were all parked in the lower of his two barns. While the upper barn was used for hay and horses, the lower barn, formerly a working barn used for dairy making, had been converted into a full-fledged repair facility, with a fourteen-foot-high door for tractors and trailers to go through. As the business grew, Obie ran out of space, and the majority of the tractors were parked up on the hill. When hard rain gouged ruts in the clay, we would fill them with cinders from Obie’s coal-fired furnace. The cinders didn’t last very long, but until rain washed them away, they added traction to the slick red clay.
Every time a tractor was parked on the hill, it was standard practice to place the gearshift in reverse before shutting it down. Leaving it in reverse effectively prevented a tractor from rolling forward. If there was a problem with getting the tractor started, we sprayed a shot of canned ether, starting fluid, directly into the air cleaner, or into the air intake tube, which was usually located on the opposite side from the exhaust muffler on the back of each truck cab. Then, because ether evaporated very quickly, we would jump back into the truck, depress the clutch, release the parking brake, and as quickly as possible, pull the left gear shift out of reverse and work it into a high gear, ideally sixth or eighth. Most of these early tractors had two-stick duplex transmissions, and it was also standard practice to park each tractor with the high/low range stick, the right one, in the high-gear position, which allowed the engine to turn more revolutions than it would have been able to if it was in a lower gear. In this way, we would get the tractor moving down the hill and after gaining some speed, we would let out the clutch, and usually the tractor would start after a few engine revolutions. I say “usually” because if the hill was too muddy, or snow-covered, we would sometimes travel halfway down Obie’s driveway before we gained enough traction to get the engine running.