In an idle hour in the office yesterday afternoon I searched back through the Commercial Motor archives to refresh my memory about the Rolls Royce Eagle when it was introduced in 1967. I had forgotten that it had the exact bore, stroke, and swept volume of the contemporary ■■■■■■■ (sorry NMM 
). In its 220 bhp guise it was road tested by CM in an Atkinson tractor unit at maximum weight. An identical powered ■■■■■■■ in another Atkinson had also been road tested. The tester thought the ■■■■■■■ a better performer and more frugal on fuel than the RR. However, both Atkinsons had different final drive ratios so it wasn’t a direct comparison in that aspect. He did comment on how noisy the RR was, and ■■■■■■■ weren’t exactly the quietest! Speed reading other articles from the time then it was obvious that RR was making a determined assault on the heavy truck market and its engines were priced accordingly to gain orders in the loose engine market. An interesting comment from the head of RR in 1973/4 was that his belief was that operators would always buy on power rating and not torque output and that the Eagle would meet forseeable power requirements.
Good input Cargo from Australia, thank you. It was soon realised that the Ergomatic cab was totally unsuitable for the Australian market and that the limitations of the cab excaberated the cooling problems in a climate much hotter than the UK. The infamous plastic fan cooling blades were also a serious problem here and burst many a radiator. My own preserved Mandator put its steel fan through the rad on a bumpy road one day. They were too close to the radiator.
I remember Dennis (Bewick) commenting about the Rollers, he wasn’t a fan and said it was only the oil companies that bought them in great numbers and that was all down to price.
Maybe the same reason why the committee designed Crusader used the RR lump, it was also used in ERF and SA in the BRS fleet in later years, but they were surely more interested in whole life costs than initial purchase price, or was it a case of pressure from the government to keep RR afloat? It never seemed to be a popular choice in normal haulage firms, with the exception of the tipper boys with their RR 220s in Scammell Routemans.
A firm my Dad worked at had a bit of a mixed fleet, with a lot of seasonal lorries parked up half the year, Leyland Super Comet tankers used in winter on heating oil drliveries and eight wheeler tippers used in the summer on aggregates, coincidentally for this thread there was a Scammell with a RR 220, a Leyland Octopus and an AEC Mammoth Major, I’m not sure ewhat engines were in the AEC and the Leyland, but I know the newest driver had the Scammell, the next in line got the Leyland and the senior driver had the AEC. That must mean something.
My Dad had an F88 and it was during a summer working on the tippers that I drove an artic all on my own for the first time, the reg was DDH 22L, it was a chrome grille model with the air wipers up the top and had the 16spd box, we were running type 1 base to what would become the M20 from Swanley to the bottom of Wrotham Hill and as soon as we pulled off the public road, I was the driver until we had to tip the load, then I took over again until we got to the end of the site, to this day it’s the best summer holiday I’ve ever had!
newmercman:
I remember Dennis (Bewick) commenting about the Rollers, he wasn’t a fan and said it was only the oil companies that bought them in great numbers and that was all down to price.Maybe the same reason why the committee designed Crusader used the RR lump, it was also used in ERF and SA in the BRS fleet in later years, but they were surely more interested in whole life costs than initial purchase price, or was it a case of pressure from the government to keep RR afloat? It never seemed to be a popular choice in normal haulage firms, with the exception of the tipper boys with their RR 220s in Scammell Routemans.
A firm my Dad worked at had a bit of a mixed fleet, with a lot of seasonal lorries parked up half the year, Leyland Super Comet tankers used in winter on heating oil drliveries and eight wheeler tippers used in the summer on aggregates, coincidentally for this thread there was a Scammell with a RR 220, a Leyland Octopus and an AEC Mammoth Major, I’m not sure ewhat engines were in the AEC and the Leyland, but I know the newest driver had the Scammell, the next in line got the Leyland and the senior driver had the AEC. That must mean something.
My Dad had an F88 and it was during a summer working on the tippers that I drove an artic all on my own for the first time, the reg was DDH 22L, it was a chrome grille model with the air wipers up the top and had the 16spd box, we were running type 1 base to what would become the M20 from Swanley to the bottom of Wrotham Hill and as soon as we pulled off the public road, I was the driver until we had to tip the load, then I took over again until we got to the end of the site, to this day it’s the best summer holiday I’ve ever had!
Hi Mark, bit off topic,but the F88 was Walsall registered and probably supplied by Hartshornes
In the 80s and 90s the cat 3306 or l10 ■■■■■■■ was the main power plant in foden 8 wheelers with the rolls as an option but they was nowhere near as common as cat or ■■■■■■■ models.
Another post of bewicks that sticks out was a senior man at ERF telling him he could supply all the lorry’s he wanted with rolls engines but his prefer ed Gardner engines he might get one or two a year. Which led on to him going on to run volvos.
Pete we’re in danger of pulling a Carryfast here with talk of F88s, if we mention tbe S word then there’s no hope for us lol
newmercman:
Pete we’re in danger of pulling a Carryfast here with talk of F88s, if we mention tbe S word then there’s no hope for us lol
Don’t worry he’s on the other side telling me what my political persuasions are
I’ll try and keep him as long as I can keep up the cracking posts on here
I never had much to do with Leylands either as a mechanic or driver but the ones I did seem to do what they were bought for
Saviem:
I was hoping that Tomdhu would give us more insight into what happened in exports world wide…I well remember just how good was the Austin WF serie…replaced in the `80s by the Bathgate built Landmaster…with its weak bodywork, and flimsy electronics…why did that happen? The WF was regarded in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, as strong as the Bedford TJ…what did Leylands “engineers” do to dumb it down!!!Leyland Nigeria…perhaps best forgotten, my old friend Bernard Momin, number one in the RVI Nigerian outfit, (who later ran the Renault Trucks operation in the UK), told me that no one believed just how Leyland management “shot themselves” in Nigeria… and that was where the Landmaster was to be built for the African market!..
a.
OK, let’s add a few extra details to what I posted earlier.
Yes, the “WF” series (or the Woofer as we used to call it affectionately) was a product tailor-made for developing markets. It had sold in the thousands but primarily in anglo-phone territories in competition with Bedford. They were big also in Pakistan and Turkey where BMC set up a major manufacturing operation in Izmir. (Incidentally, BMC Senai is still there making various models with ■■■■■■■ engines.)
The Wooffers were market leaders in Nigeria and Ghana and I recall visiting our distributers there in 1972 on my very first Africa trip. They were sold both as Austin and Morris and these were distributed by two large French trading houses SCOA and CFAO. CFAO/SCOA were extremely well organised and knew how to market the vehicles through their indigenous sub-dealers and traders. The traditional Leyland & Albion products were distributed by B.E.W.A.C. (Incidentally, CFAO in the last 30 years has flourished and distributes a whole range of different marques throughout Africa and one step of their development was to buy the assets of several of Leyland’s overseas subsidiaries).
But to come back to the main theme, the demise of the WF in traditional export markets was can be largely summarised in two words – “Bathgate” and “Quality”.
Bathgate was a massive (260 acre) green-field development by BMC. Planned in the late 50s it came on stream in 1962. It was set up with encouragement by the government, in areas of high unemployment, at the same time as the new Rootes Group factory at Linfield, near Paisley. Linfield was created to build the new Hillman Imp and it was somewhere I visited for a job interview in 1963. (I opted to join Leyland instead)
Both plants had much in common. They were both destined for complete failure but at least Linwood avoided the long drawn out death throws experienced at Bathgate.
Whilst the Bathgate site was entirely new, around 75% of the machinery was not. Much of it had been used in WW2 at BMC in Birmingham. These machines were relocated in batches week by week (at weekends) over a period of 2 years. It was a huge operation and at one time Bathgate it housed the largest concentration of machine tools under one roof in Europe.
Now, relocating machine tools and giving them new operators rarely succeeds. Just as Leyland found out later when the closed Southall and transferred TL12 production to Leyland. As Fred Boulton said…“”“Details such as surface finishes and some tolerances were not adequately specified on the AEC drawings and Leyland had long since ceased to rely on a fully skilled workforce. The TL12 was a very fine engine whose reputation was lost as a result of a badly managed change of manufacturing base”“”
Skilled machine operators “know” their machines, their idiosyncrasies and how to fix them.
Lose the skilled operators and your tolerances go out of spec and your scrapage rate soars. On top of this, the labour force at Bathgate largely comprised redundant manual workers from the shale mines that were closed some years previously.
On top of this they were highly union organised (from their mining days) and this was reinforced by the militant Longbridge union connections. They weren’t anything like the loyal skilled men that lived in the village of Leyland. Chalk and cheese!
To exacerbate the situation further, BMC in 1961 enlarged the capacity of the 6 cylinder diesel to 5.7 litres and this brought major overheating together with warping of the block and several other stress related failings.
BMC never fixed the engine and after the merger in 1968 Leyland was pre-occupied with problems closer to home, so it took from 1968 to 1972 for Leyland to rectify many of the issues with the introduction of the 98 series.
The 98 series was a huge improvement. Some rectification work continued until it was finally sorted in 1983.
Herewith is an article in Commercial Motor……
archive.commercialmotor.com/arti … te-engines
So imagine you are a cocoa transporter in rural Nigeria and you have been buying trusty Austin and Morris WFs for years. You buy a new one and on day one it overheats and it keeps on overheating daily. No one knows of a solution. The engine disintegrates completely after a few months.
Multiply this by severalthousand and you get the picture. They deserted the product in droves.
The Landmaster was introduced and was a decent enough truck albeit with its own little wrinkles but it wasn’t enough to reclaim the lost ground. The old BMC export markets were gone, lost forever.
Here’s a Woofer we assembled earlier…
^^^^^^^Spot on there Tomdhu, I was working on BMC’s for eight years (1966-74) and I remember very well the 5.7 Bathgate problems! The earlier Longbridge built ones were pretty reliable in the FHK. The 4/98- 6/98 engines were a decent unit in the end but by then it was too late alas.
We serviced a few WF’s, even more of the earlier WEK’s, but normal control trucks were on the decline in the UK by then.
Pete.
gingerfold:
In an idle hour in the office yesterday afternoon I searched back through the Commercial Motor archives to refresh my memory about the Rolls Royce Eagle when it was introduced in 1967. I had forgotten that it had the exact bore, stroke, and swept volume of the contemporary ■■■■■■■ (sorry NMM
According to the archive information the Eagle was designed using the same bore/stroke as the previous C type which was the same as the pre 14 litre 743 ■■■■■■■■■■■■■ although customers obviously weren’t bright enough to be able to differentiate the benefits of the ‘type of power’ made by multiplying more torque by less engine speed the manufacturers by that point certainly were.While Saviem’s references to buying habits regarding the T45 suggest that customer requirements regarding output were based on anything but price.At which point it was all about the relative specific torque potential of the TL12 v the Rolls Eagle ( or 14 litre ■■■■■■■ ) at which point as I said it was game over for Leyland as an in house truck manufacturer and thereby the business case for the continuation of that side of the Group.The car side having been consigned to its oblivion by the even worse engineering design decisions of Issigonis.Let alone the decision by Leyland Group to then take them in resulting in the inevitable financial time bomb that also eventually took out Rover and Triumph.With Jaguar having been lucky to survive it.Again mostly owing to the engineering decisions of its designers who made a product that its equally knowledgeable buyers ( preference for the big multi cylinder engine and rwd formula ) kept alive.
Tomdhu:
But to come back to the main theme, the demise of the WF in traditional export markets was can be largely summarised in two words – “Bathgate” and “Quality”.
That’s surprising.We ran a large mixed fleet of both those and the TJ when I was working for the council which had survived from the 1970’s well into the 1980’s.I much preferred the WF to the hopeless 4 cylinder and synchro box in the TJ.While I don’t remember any reliability issues with our WF’s at least.
this get boring ,there have to be somthing else then bore and storke that failed the company ,usualy the thing ,when you take 1+1+1+1+1 it isnot 4 it can bee-1,cheers benkku
Carryfast:
Tomdhu:
But to come back to the main theme, the demise of the WF in traditional export markets was can be largely summarised in two words – “Bathgate” and “Quality”.That’s surprising.We ran a large mixed fleet of both those and the TJ when I was working for the council which had survived from the 1970’s well into the 1980’s.I much preferred the WF to the hopeless 4 cylinder and synchro box in the TJ.While I don’t remember any reliability issues with our WF’s at least.
Yes, as I’ve said , if they were 5.7s built outside of the period 1962-1972, they would have been OK. If they were 5.is then they were OK, mostly.
bma.finland:
this get boring ,there have to be somthing else then bore and storke that failed the company ,usualy the thing ,when you take 1+1+1+1+1 it isnot 4 it can bee-1,cheers benkku
No one is saying it wasn’t a combination of things. 
The issue being that the bad engineering design decisions,concerning the long term production life viabilty of the 760 engine and the cash wasted on the AEC V8 and Leyland getting involved with BMC on the car side itself mostly wrecked by the engineering design decisions of Issigonis,shouldn’t be underestimated.Nor should Leyland Group’s workforce be made the scapegoats for the damage caused by those decisions.
windrush:
^^^^^^^Spot on there Tomdhu, I was working on BMC’s for eight years (1966-74) and I remember very well the 5.7 Bathgate problems! The earlier Longbridge built ones were pretty reliable in the FHK. The 4/98- 6/98 engines were a decent unit in the end but by then it was too late alas.
We serviced a few WF’s, even more of the earlier WEK’s, but normal control trucks were on the decline in the UK by then.Pete.
Hopefully you never drove one. Weight for weight, they had the heaviest steering of any truck I ever drove!
Tomdhu:
windrush:
^^^^^^^Spot on there Tomdhu, I was working on BMC’s for eight years (1966-74) and I remember very well the 5.7 Bathgate problems! The earlier Longbridge built ones were pretty reliable in the FHK. The 4/98- 6/98 engines were a decent unit in the end but by then it was too late alas.
We serviced a few WF’s, even more of the earlier WEK’s, but normal control trucks were on the decline in the UK by then.Pete.
Hopefully you never drove one. Weight for weight, they had the heaviest steering of any truck I ever drove!
I drove plenty of them, but I didn’t find them any heavier than the FG models and some folk complained about those having heavy steering! On the larger models of the WF and FG power steering was a listed option like the FFK’s and FHK’s but I never found any FG’s with it fitted.
Pete.
windrush:
Tomdhu:
windrush:
^^^^^^^Spot on there Tomdhu, I was working on BMC’s for eight years (1966-74) and I remember very well the 5.7 Bathgate problems! The earlier Longbridge built ones were pretty reliable in the FHK. The 4/98- 6/98 engines were a decent unit in the end but by then it was too late alas.
We serviced a few WF’s, even more of the earlier WEK’s, but normal control trucks were on the decline in the UK by then.Pete.
Hopefully you never drove one. Weight for weight, they had the heaviest steering of any truck I ever drove!
I drove plenty of them, but I didn’t find them any heavier than the FG models and some folk complained about those having heavy steering! On the larger models of the WF and FG power steering was a listed option like the FFK’s and FHK’s but I never found any FG’s with it fitted.
Pete.
The steering the Titan PD2a/27 was bloody heavy - made I ■■■■! Robert
windrush:
I drove plenty of them, but I didn’t find them any heavier than the FG models and some folk complained about those having heavy steering! On the larger models of the WF and FG power steering was a listed option like the FFK’s and FHK’s but I never found any FG’s with it fitted.Pete.
Realistically non powered steering even on many cars was a liability let alone on trucks of whetever type.On that note I’d agree I didn’t notice any real difference between the non powered TJ’s,FG’s,WF’s or Bedford R type with from memory the R type probably being the worst combination of weight and steering position in that range of vehicles.With all at some point needing the old fashioned driving test style push pull steering method or a throw of the arm and then grabbing the wheel to get it moving.
While the TK seemed to have a reduced steering box gearing in an attempt to reduce steering loads which was also often awkward in use.While from memory the old Ford D series was one of the best non powered steering designs to drive.
kr79:
0
Obvious massive failure of the publicity department that really needed to be a mini skirt of around the same length as the shorts. 
