Good Things Come to Those Who Wait (16 Seconds)

Something wikkid sweet this way comes ...

Wait for it … wait for it!!!

Ed. – It turns out our own resident IH jockey, Zach Bowman, bought one of his stallions from the maker of this fine roadgoing locomotive. Take it away, Zach …

I am not a mechanic. I’m a parts jockey. I can bolt things together, break them down, clean them up and keep hunks of unsafe rust on the road, but when it comes to pure mechanical genius I’m down the intake without a spark. Grigg Mullen III, however, has no such deficiency. I had the good fortune of suffering through high school with Grigg’s younger brother, and while I never got close to knowing the elder Mullen personally, on the scant few occasions that we crossed paths, I was always dumbfounded by the guy’s boundless knowledge of all-things mechanical.

I bought my first International Scout from a field behind the Mullen family’s home in Virginia, and after watching me struggle to figure out why I wasn’t getting fuel to the carb, Grigg grabbed and old, drained fire extinguisher, filled it with compressed air and set to pressurizing the intake side of the fuel pump. After spinning a few more wrenches, the truck was on the road and driving me home.

“There’s a check ball in there that gets stuck sometimes,” he said.

I did my best to nod knowingly.

But when he’s not saving fledgling hoons from immobility, the guy is wrenching on a pair of diesel monstrosities. The beast you see in the clip below is a 1948 Chevrolet frame with a two-ton rear axle and a 1978 Detroit Diesel 4-53T in the nose. A Roadranger 10-speed transmission handles cog-swapping duties. Mullen also has a one-ton iteration with a three-cylinder Detroit laying down the torque.

Madness? Oh yes. But it’s our kind of crazy.

Ed. – Happy Truck Thursday, and thanks to Big Pete for the tip. Keep on truckin’!

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