Last time I was hithhiking to Poland, I had a lift from a Polish owner driver who was driving quite old Magnum. He said it has well over a milion kms on the clock and he would like to change it, but due to financial difficulties he decided to stick to it, as, in his words “not much wrong with it”.
He had his upper bunk replaced with some nice custom made cabinets and shelves, I think you shouldn’t be complaining on storage space with that.
And he said that this airbags under the cab broke quite often and he has to replace them, and when he had a small crash with a car, the cab tilted forward and something went wrong and it was very expensive to replace, but since it was cars drivers fault, he had that done from his insurers.
He was quite happy with it.
I recon that if he has to replace this airbags “quite often” and it still pays to him, it should be good for you, as I guess you will be driving mostly on motorways, not on some forrest ducts that still most of Polish driving is done…
Ah, and his was displaing a MAZ badge instead of Renault, as they were assebled on Belarus for some brief time… He said it was some out of court settlement for that Renault “spied” of some late-soviet experimental vehicle and used some original solutions…
So by driving Magnum you can feel proudly as you drive a step-daughter of MAZ Perestroika: ?
Note that the whole bottom part is turning, not just the wheels… And Mr Colani thinks that he is innovative with this one?
I know, Colani’s one looks nicer, but I would dare to tell that when it comes to practicality, I would myself vote for MAZ Perestroika
I saw more on that MAZ project once in some Polish trucking magazine or something, and i have to say, it was not so stupid as it looks… I can’t remember much, but as far as I recall the basic idea for a whole construction was modular, I think what we see in that picture is a MAZ tractor with less or more traditional semi-trailer. You could attach standard trailer to it and drive it as a rigid (as it has front wheel drive), the only issue is that the tractor has only one axle, so it is no good to drive on its own (but I think there is third wheel hidden underneath that you can use for manuevring it)…
You could also attach shorter semitrailer to it and tow a standard trailer, which had a capacity of the scandinavian style road train while still being shorter a bit and had only one articulated place, which made it easier to reverse…
I think later they gave up on some more innovative ideas and made it more traditional truck…
French were spying on it, but after all they decided only to use independently suspended cab, which was then protested by (by then) Belarus and the whole matter was settled out of court and the number of Magnums to be assembled in Belarus was part of that deal…
I tried to find some information on it, but google seems to don’t know about this project (at least not in the languages I can understand), but (to get back to the topic) I found this nice picture of Magnum prototype:
Solly:
Hey…Harry…I may have missed it …but have you decided which make of truck you are going with■■?
Yep, a couple of comments on it here viewtopic.php?f=4&t=86549 and I’ll maybe talk more later but I’m off to do my driver’s CPC right now (and for the rest of this week).
i see were your coming from too, the premiums are again spot on, volvo running gear & renault electronics & cab, i quiet like the newer premium cab, the top bunk is comfy & the shelf in passenger side instead of a locker is ideal to mount a flatscreen tv.
howerver if i were going to be away 90% of the week & i was buying the truck then id sure be looking at my own comfort, depends on the mpg’s of both to what id go for as even half a mpg over the course of the year is quiet a considerable amount of money. on plus side ive spoken to plenty of drivers with the renault auto box prefer it to volvos i shift.
Are they not the same box? I drive a variety of vehicles on agency work and so far the I-Shift is the daddy! Not experienced the Frog version though and find it hard to imagine how it could be better but always willing to learn!
i see were your coming from too, the premiums are again spot on, volvo running gear & renault electronics & cab, i quiet like the newer premium cab, the top bunk is comfy & the shelf in passenger side instead of a locker is ideal to mount a flatscreen tv.
howerver if i were going to be away 90% of the week & i was buying the truck then id sure be looking at my own comfort, depends on the mpg’s of both to what id go for as even half a mpg over the course of the year is quiet a considerable amount of money. on plus side ive spoken to plenty of drivers with the renault auto box prefer it to volvos i shift.
Are they not the same box? I drive a variety of vehicles on agency work and so far the I-Shift is the daddy! Not experienced the Frog version though and find it hard to imagine how it could be better but always willing to learn!
You can’t go from N into D or F into R with your right THUMB on the Volvo I-shift but you can with the same box but different computer “tweeks” on the Renault Opti-drive
I was always looking down at the gearstick on the I-shift when moving into N or R but never on the Renault or EVER needed to shift it into manual either
Roundabouts are a breeze with the Renault either loaded OR empty.
pleased to see you chose the magnum harry it will not let you down, i went to call in on friday to see it but it wasnt in the yard at the time only there premium, think my dads ios trailer was parked in front of there office.
truckers boy:
pleased to see you chose the magnum harry it will not let you down,
I must say it was a decent truck, and I’ve looked at loads. I travelled from one end of the country to the other to see it and I wouldn’t do that if I thought I was on a fool’s errand.
I might be wrong but I’m normally a pretty good judge of character and John and Joanne seemed completely on the level to me.
Harry Monk:
Come on Orys, you know as well as I do that anything made in Belarus in the 1990s was complete and total junk!
The point is that it was never made - it was only a prototype, and then Soviet Union collapsed (as we speak about late 1980s with this).
As for 90s - well there wasn’t anything modern or good quality, but if you look for something that is REALLY indestructable, you should look east. Altough I would rather recomend Kamaz over MAZ
(Unless you want something that is up to XXI standards, and comfortable to drive and economical… Then off course Magnum will be all right )
orys:
As for 90s - well there wasn’t anything modern or good quality, but if you look for something that is REALLY indestructable, you should look east. Altough I would rather recomend Kamaz over MAZ
Kamaz and MAZ were both the same. The state pretended to pay the workers, so the workers pretended to assemble trucks.
Maybe a Moskvitch or a Zhiguli were good cars, although by Western standards of the time you didn’t have to find an independent mechanic to take your new car apart after you had bought it and then re-assemble it, only this time properly!
orys:
As for 90s - well there wasn’t anything modern or good quality, but if you look for something that is REALLY indestructable, you should look east. Altough I would rather recomend Kamaz over MAZ
Kamaz and MAZ were both the same. The state pretended to pay the workers, so the workers pretended to assemble trucks.
We are talking about 1990s, let me remind you And off course you are wrong, these trucks were really good. I grew up under communism, I used a lot of soviet made items, and many of them were great quality… I still have some of them and use them… No modern stuff would last so long…
Maybe a Moskvitch or a Zhiguli were good cars, although by Western standards of the time you didn’t have to find an independent mechanic to take your new car apart after you had bought it and then re-assemble it, only this time properly!
Well, you are half right on that. It was true when you were buying it on internal market. For Western market, the cars were reassebled and fitted with some more luxury by the export companies… And the workers were doing it right, as they were often working on the west and paid in dollars
I must say that you are the first Polish person I have ever heard to have a kind word to say about the Soviet Union, because during the many years I spent in Poland I only ever heard about the USSR in the context of being a despised occupying army.
Harry Monk:
Come on Orys, you know as well as I do that anything made in Belarus in the 1990s was complete and total junk!
The point is that it was never made - it was only a prototype, and then Soviet Union collapsed (as we speak about late 1980s with this).
As for 90s - well there wasn’t anything modern or good quality, but if you look for something that is REALLY indestructable, you should look east. Altough I would rather recomend Kamaz over MAZ
Blimey an 18 year old Kamaz wouldn’t even have been worth £22,000 when it was new let alone now with 10,000,000 k’s on it.
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