From: chance wolf (chance_wolf@shaw.ca)
Date: Tue Jan 13 2004 - 13:55:09 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Witold Grzymala-Busse" <wbusse@ips-networking.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 12:55 PM
Subject: [MV] Buying Military trucks from Hawaii
> I am sure many of us have looked at the govliquidation website and lusted
> after the M-939 series trucks from Hawaii going for nothing or next to
> nothing. I did and one foolish day last year in June I bought a m-923a1
for
> $295.00, at first I was shocked and I had no idea on how to get it back to
> CONUS. Here is my story:
Wow. That was a great and useful story. Thanks for sharing it. I looked at
those 939-series trucks several times over the last year and figured
shipping costs would be astronomical, so I didn't bother pursuing it. Just
for information's sake, roughly what did it cost you shipping-wise from
Hawaii to Tacoma?
As to the rust, yeah - when CUCVs were going fairly cheap down there,
someone I know stopped by the DRMO yard while on holiday in Hawaii to see
what the machines were like. He told tales of huge rust holes through the
firewalls and at the base of the windshield and basically figured they were
good for mechanical parts only. Pretty pricey parts source.
939-series trucks seem to have a bad rust problem across the board. The cab
metal is just plain thin and lousy in comparison to the M35, M54 and
800-series equipment, and though I'm no metallurgist, the fact it
'fractures' so badly as opposed to bending or denting (coupled with the
propensity to rust out brutally) leads me to believe there might be an awful
lot of carbon in it - or that the metal itself is bargain-basement recycled
stuff meant to last five years and disintegrate. Like 1970's Toyotas.
I spent hours and hours welding up the one at work and found fracture points
all over the place - especially around the cab-side door jambs and latches.
Even the 'reinforcement' bits from the factory fractured away from the main
body of the cab wherever stressed - and to make it more frustrating - they
all broke away just past the factory welds. The hoods aren't much better.
I saw one which had come down from Adak which was corroded everywhere you
could have corrosion, and many more where the nose of the hood has some
fairly significant corrosion damage and often outright holes. The only
automotive things on civvy street to rust that badly of anything like the
same vintage are 1980's Ford pickups :)
All that aside - I like them. The Army has a standing order restricting
their highway road speed to 40 mph after a series of accidents resulting in
rollovers (empty truck, wet pavement, marginal driver), and an MWO is
evidently being applied to refit the 939-family with a retrofit ABS braking
system and some sort of reinforcement/roll-bar affair to the cab ("to be
installed when the cabs are changed as part of corrosion control" or
whatever.) I can see where they had the problem under those conditions I
described though. The one at work brakes a bit over-efficiently with no
payload and takes awhile to get used to, and where the incredibly tight
turning circle for a truck that large is a real boon when you *want* to turn
tight, I can see it being a serious bane in any wet-road, skid-control
situation when coupled with an inexperienced driver. That's probably why so
many went paws-up on the Interstates and in Europe.
(I still see a few of the original 10-wheel layout 939-series trundling
around Ft. Lewis, WA doing garbage runs and the like, but I think every one
I've seen in convoy has been the six-wheel type. The one we have at work
for film is an ex-USMC 1st MEF M925, and when I was on rust patrol, I found
an expended round of some odd foreign calibre trapped underneath the
driver's mat. The driver's door had been replaced too.)
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