Smithco’s Side-Dumper Is Strictly for Off-Road Running
Really big rig pauses while Western Star dealers and customers listen to presenters at the Michelin Proving grounds in South Carolina. Photos: Tom Berg
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Really big rig pauses while Western Star dealers and customers listen to presenters at the Michelin Proving grounds in South Carolina. Photos: Tom Berg
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Now here’s a serious dump trailer: Smithco’s 85-Metric-Ton Gooseneck Tipper, one of the pieces of equipment recently demonstrated by Western Star Trucks at the Michelin Proving Grounds in South Carolina. It was pulled by a 6900XD from Western Star, which was showing off its line of off-road vehicles that compete with “haul trucks” from Caterpillar, Kumatsu, Terrex, and others.
While pulling the Smithco tipper, the 6900XD acted as a tractor, but it’s really a straight truck fitted with a fifth-wheel kit. It’s part of the MBT-40 Multi-Body Transformer system from Carco Industries, using a Palfinger extreme duty model G68 hooklift that picks up bodies and puts them back down. This gives a truck multiple roles at a mine or heavy construction site.
Hook-lift systems are not new, and I recall writing about them in the 1980s (Palfinger offers many models of its own). But those are comparatively small, on-highway products, while the MBT-40 is capable of lifting and supporting larger and heavier bodies, and therefore loads. At this demo, Carco had steel dump and water tank bodies present and showed how they can be interchanged as needed by an operator.
The fifth wheel kit includes a subframe on which the coupling device is mounted. That raises the fifth wheel’s height by more than a foot, and the Smithco trailer’s gooseneck is correspondingly higher than it would otherwise need to be. Partly because of a higher center of gravity, this trailer’s capacity of 85 metric tons (93.7 standard or “short” tons) is somewhat less than the 100 metric tons (110 standard tons) it might otherwise be rated for, a Smithco rep said. The trade-off is …Read the rest of this story
