Looking at the state of the lorry and trailer, how often did/does one have to change the filters?
Sent from my Hol-U19 using Tapatalk
Air filters that is…
Sent from my Hol-U19 using Tapatalk
By the look of the colour of the mud I would say they’re somewhere south of Samara on their way through the Caspian Depression heading to the top end of the Arial Sea ( or what’\ was left of it )
We used to carry filters with us… usually a couple of full sets Air, Fuel, oil, air dryer… As long as you could keep going faster than the wind was blowing the dust you were all right… we didn’t use to tow to tail… usually half a K or so between trucks…
On some of the really rough stuff you might only be able to do 15 20 k’s so if the wind was going faster than that in the same direction it would ■■■■ your own dust into the air stack… time for parking up for a while…
The worst sand storm I was in was in the northern Sahara …Tunisia… there’s a story about that…
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=110708&hilit=surprising+tale#p1683134
Not trying to knick you thread here Mick…
Jeff…
Jelliot:
By the look of the colour of the mud I would say they’re somewhere south of Samara on their way through the Caspian Depression heading to the top end of the Arial Sea ( or what’\ was left of it )We used to carry filters with us… usually a couple of full sets Air, Fuel, oil, air dryer… As long as you could keep going faster than the wind was blowing the dust you were all right… we didn’t use to tow to tail… usually half a K or so between trucks…
On some of the really rough stuff you might only be able to do 15 20 k’s so if the wind was going faster than that in the same direction it would ■■■■ your own dust into the air stack… time for parking up for a while…
The worst sand storm I was in was in the northern Sahara …Tunisia… there’s a story about that…
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=110708&hilit=surprising+tale#p1683134
Not trying to knick you thread here Mick…
Jeff…
No problems Jeff. It links in with the Rijnart photo’s and question about air filters. A very interesting tale, no doubt about it.
Jelliot:
By the look of the colour of the mud I would say they’re somewhere south of Samara on their way through the Caspian Depression heading to the top end of the Arial Sea ( or what’\ was left of it )We used to carry filters with us… usually a couple of full sets Air, Fuel, oil, air dryer… As long as you could keep going faster than the wind was blowing the dust you were all right… we didn’t use to tow to tail… usually half a K or so between trucks…
On some of the really rough stuff you might only be able to do 15 20 k’s so if the wind was going faster than that in the same direction it would ■■■■ your own dust into the air stack… time for parking up for a while…
The worst sand storm I was in was in the northern Sahara …Tunisia… there’s a story about that…
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=110708&hilit=surprising+tale#p1683134
Not trying to knick you thread here Mick…
Jeff…
Thanks Jeff. I had never considered the impact of the wind blowing faster than you could travel. Was any modifications being made to air intakes to try and add additional filtering, I guess keeping the inside of the lorry clean was also challenging.
Vodka Cola Cowboy:
Jelliot:
By the look of the colour of the mud I would say they’re somewhere south of Samara on their way through the Caspian Depression heading to the top end of the Arial Sea ( or what’\ was left of it )We used to carry filters with us… usually a couple of full sets Air, Fuel, oil, air dryer… As long as you could keep going faster than the wind was blowing the dust you were all right… we didn’t use to tow to tail… usually half a K or so between trucks…
On some of the really rough stuff you might only be able to do 15 20 k’s so if the wind was going faster than that in the same direction it would ■■■■ your own dust into the air stack… time for parking up for a while…
The worst sand storm I was in was in the northern Sahara …Tunisia… there’s a story about that…
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=110708&hilit=surprising+tale#p1683134
Not trying to knick you thread here Mick…
Jeff…
No problems Jeff. It links in with the Rijnart photo’s and question about air filters. A very interesting tale, no doubt about it.
Sent from my Hol-U19 using Tapatalk
We had a Swiss driver with us … Yet to be discovered genius… not really!!! … Barking mad… you know the type, always tinkering with things… insisted on doing naked yoga and playing hippy ■■■■■ music… whale songs… eating only brown rice for four days to cleanse his … bum probably… and he constantly wore one of those knitted hats with the ear flaps and hanging string… not that I’m trying to judge or anything… Even if there was nothing wrong with it he’d be doing some kind of needless modification…But he got on and did the job…
Well he had this idea that the summer time dust of Kazakhstan was doing irreparable damage to everything…
We were sitting at the border at Donets’k and it was taking a bit of time so our Swiss mate starts getting into the air stack… He’s got it all of and it’s laying about round the truck in no sort of order at all…I’m keeping well back, staying well out of it…but later on Belgium Bob says Hippy Hat’s got a fan from and air con unit and duck taped it inside the air stack facing up the way, and a wire to a spare switch on the dash, so that when it get dusty he can switch the fan on and blow all the dust back out before it even gets to the filter… MMMM… fair enough…nuff said… He spent the next few days babbling on the two way about how he was going to do a world wide patent on his fan invention… Then! …while we were having lunch at on of those fancy Kazakhstan road houses ( have you ever seen photos of the M 32 ) Hippy Hat noticed that his invention had disappeared… gone… totally… like it had never even been there… I’m staying well out of it…You really don’t want to tow trucks across Kazakhstan if you don’t have to…
Dust in the cab… well there’s loads of kind of dust… fesh fesh… like talcum powder has to be the worst… used to get it in the northern Sahara ( probably still do ) There’ no base to it… you can sink in it like water… really light as well and a bit invasive when it gets windy… Sand isn’t to bad but when it gets air bourn it doesn’t half sting…
I used to give it the evil eye, and stare at it, sending out telepathic threats, and warn it to stay out…but it never really listened…or perhaps it was just to dumb to understand… One thing I did and still do when I’m off road is stop for 10— 15 seconds before I open the door to let the dust blow past… nothing like a crunchy bed at night…
Mud well there’s that as well, as long as there’s not to much clay in it it’s not to bad, you just have to live with it… let it dry out then blow it back out the door… driving through it isn’t much fun, some of it’s pretty low on the traction side of things…
If the road has a high crown and it’s muddy they you have to stay in the middle of the road other wise your sliding into the ditch…
We have black soil in Australia it’s all right when it’s dry but when it’s wet there’ little to no traction on it… or indeed in it… if you’re out remote and the road crew doesn’t have anything else around then they’ll used it to make the road… but you won’t see them back in the area until it’s dried out… then you’ll get a bullocking for mucking up the road… Remember… it doesn’t matter where you were or even if you were there at all… if you’re a truck driver then you’re going to get the blame…
Rynart Trading blokes… on the whole pretty good bunch of guys… Truks and Czech, still some Dutch blokes even in the late 90’s, Lithuanians as well… Steijns were mainly Dutch drivers red Kenworths and Dafs… Ferderici every now and again… I think they had a contract for heating / aircon ducts to a hotel chain Yekaterinburg, Cheljabinsk, Astana …Didn’t really see many Westerns out past Samara… One or two trailers about, but they might have been old stack sold on, still in original livery…
Jeff…
I remember seeing these on the road to Moscow. The second trailer hooked to a bogie. They could not run through Germany like this, so they set it up in Poland and then ran through to Russia. I should think that it was fun getting this through the traffic in Moscow. 
Vodka Cola Cowboy:
I remember seeing these on the road to Moscow. The second trailer hooked to a bogie. They could not run through Germany like this, so they set it up in Poland and then ran through to Russia. I should think that it was fun getting this through the traffic in Moscow.
Ah the roadtrain…I reckon he was the only one who’d run like that into Russia…? Can’t think of anyone else doing the same thing…
Found some more pic’s of it…
Cheers, Patrick
Nice one Patrick
Sent from my Hol-U19 using Tapatalk
That’s when you needed a bobbin of thread… Those queues were indeed a test of stamina, constantly moving night and day for days at a time … Tie the end of a bit of thread to the back of the trailer in front and the other end to your window wiper… when he moved forward it would pull the wiper up a bit before the thread broke and the arm would slap back onto the screen hopefully wakening you… usually about 2 minutes after you finally got to sleep…We only went that way a couple of times.
That was one of the main reason we went up through the old eastern bloc into the Ukraine, and Mackie went out through Finland… Some of those queues were days long…I did a lot of bad guitar playing sitting in queues like that… I never really got any better at the guitar… still amazingly crap at it…
Export Transport out of Honiton tried a road train sort of thing through Russia 13.7 meter trailer on a home made dolly pulled by an FH 10 6 x2 ridged… I don’t know all the ins and outs of it but they had to drop the trailer somewhere north of Moscow and do another 3 runs to Perm with the rigid to empty the trailer… not good when there was only 2 blokes on the whole job…
Jeff…
There are pics of that FL10 on here somewhere, it had a Globetrotter roof extension if it’s the one I’m thinking of?
Dirty Dan:
Here is a swedish company doing far east transport. This time KemerovoDanne
A great addition to the thread Dan. More interesting angles.
pv83:
Vodka Cola Cowboy:
4I remember seeing these on the road to Moscow. The second trailer hooked to a bogie. They could not run through Germany like this, so they set it up in Poland and then ran through to Russia. I should think that it was fun getting this through the traffic in Moscow.
Ah the roadtrain…I reckon he was the only one who’d run like that into Russia…? Can’t think of anyone else doing the same thing…
Found some more pic’s of it…Cheers, Patrick
Some more excellent photo’s Patrick. Thanks
yeah. The border queues killed the job.
In 1990 and 91 there were no queues. In fact, you could turn up at the border and find that you were the only one there. Or there may have been 2 or 3 other trucks.
Changing trailers at Siedlce to head back to Moscow, I knew exactly where I would get to that night for dinner. If I was early I could make Smolensk. If it was late it would be Minsk. Everything was predictable. You could do the border at Kukariki in less than an hour.
When the queues started they could be as long as 4 days to get into Belarus and 24 to 48 to get back out into Poland, at their worst.
You spent day after day cat napping over the wheel. Jumping those that fell asleep in front of you.
It ruined the job.
Vodka Cola Cowboy:
yeah. The border queues killed the job.
In 1990 and 91 there were no queues. In fact, you could turn up at the border and find that you were the only one there. Or there may have been 2 or 3 other trucks.
Changing trailers at Siedlce to head back to Moscow, I knew exactly where I would get to that night for dinner. If I was early I could make Smolensk. If it was late it would be Minsk. Everything was predictable. You could do the border at Kukariki in less than an hour.
When the queues started they could be as long as 4 days to get into Belarus and 24 to 48 to get back out into Poland, at their worst.
You spent day after day cat napping over the wheel. Jumping those that fell asleep in front of you.
It ruined the job.
And you are right, it really did ruin the job. All that nonsense of slumping over the wheel to catch another 20 minutes of sleep before manically overtaking any slumbering drivers at those Eastern European borders was a recipe for disaster - it was all sleep-deprivation, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen, plot-loss stuff! In the mid-90s even the border at Shirnding/Pomezi (Germany/Czech Republic) was like this - 'king nightmare! I remember seeing Brit drivers spread-eagling themselves against the grilles of artics trying to overtake them on this border in a futile attempt to stop them getting in front. I have to say, I soon learnt to park up and claim my sleep before attempting these crossings even if it slowed the job down: I preferred to be fresh and ready for the next shift! 
Robert
Sorry for my naivety, but couldn’t some system have been introduced to ensure a fair processing the paperwork? Where you could hand in your paperwork and receive an estimated time when they might be processed by. Maybe I’ve lived too long in Germany…
Regards
Johnny
Sent from my Hol-U19 using Tapatalk
jsutherland:
Sorry for my naivety, but couldn’t some system have been introduced to ensure a fair processing the paperwork? Where you could hand in your paperwork and receive an estimated time when they might be processed by. Maybe I’ve lived too long in Germany…
Regards
JohnnySent from my Hol-U19 using Tapatalk
Never been to Eastern Bloc countries then Johnny 
If there ever was a system, I didn’t find it as efficient as the Swiss one for example…
Only system they had was to be as lazy as one can be, take as much bribe they could lay their hands on (alcohol, tobacco or ■■■■ mag related…oh and money of course…) and act as absolute ■■■■■■■■■■■■■ from that and being stopped by the local authority every 20 miles or so, once you were in, it wasn’t all that bad actually…
I only had the pleasure of enduring such treatment within the last year before they’d opened up the borders, must have been a real treat in the mid-90s I reckon…
Anyone else thinks Romania was by far the worst to get into…coming in from Hungary that is…Didn’t seem to mind which border you crossed, hated them all…never fancied going to Romania either…
But maybe the other lads have got “better” experiences…?