For the two years it took me to build my house, I worked swing shift driving a Cat 769. Mine was a bit older, same truck. Could burn 105 gallons of diesel fuel on a hard 12-hour shift in the summer offloading gravel for a complete re-pave of I-5.

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I drove around mixers, dumps, loaders and regular traffic in a combined ready-mix, sand, gravel, crushing, dredging and asphalt paving operation on the Willamette River, about 1 mile from downtown. The 769 weighed 33 tons empty, could haul another 40 tons and was 12 feet wide. Diesel, with a manually shifted 3 range, 9 speed automatic transmission. I offloaded barges, some of the output of the crushing operation and moved material around the yard.

One night I drove around a corner to see an apprentice Operating Engineer cutting a steel plate. He'd leaned it up against his tank cart, and was carefully cutting through the damned thing, his green O2 tank glowing. I yelled as loud as I could, blew the gawdawful horn, turned my truck and raised the bed as I was driving away to get as much metal between me and him as I could. (Believe it or not, that thing could turn INSIDE the radius of a Volkswagen bug. We tried it once.)

I could see him in the mirror. He stopped, raised his mask, and looked at me. He then turned back and saw what he was doing.

I thought it could explode. He thought it could explode. The foreman thought it could have exploded. That was it for him that night, he went home. I didn't think he should drive, but those were different days.

Arf