The Jamie Davis Towing Discussion Thread

Did you guys see Season 4 Episode 6 Ice Storm where Ken Monkhause and that other guy I think his name is Ritchie had to pull a camper trailer off the side of a ditch on the back road?
That guy Ritchie seemed like an okay dude, but you could tell he went through a learning experience when he pulled to far ahead and pulled all the cable off the tow truck. You could tell he was thinking "Great job idiot." He was thinking that to him self, that was defiantly a learning experience for him. It was one of those when you know better you do better type situations. However Ken got the job done and it was a success.

I betcha Ritchie never makes that mistake again.
It's funny how and I've made common sense mistakes to we all have, it's just funny how that goes. After it happens your sitting there thinking, great, great common sense says don't go further then you have cable, but as my uncle Dave says "People do stupid things in the heat of the moment."

I bet next time he's in that situation he'll probably be a lot more careful.

 

Season 4 they had the new guy John driving Bruce's old Holmes 750 1994 Peterbuilt Wrecker. That tow truck to me, is not totally right all the time for what they do at Jamie Davis that piece of equipment is fine if you are in the big city just towing broken down trucks or whatever, but outside of that, that tow truck is probably obsolete it's a nice truck it sure is and like I said if your in the city and just towing broken downs or some one out of a ditch or stuck on an icy hill or in a parking lot it's fine, but for what they are doing with some of those huge big $30,000 jobs that truck is economically obsolete in my opinion.

Which is probably why they had Bruce driving it, because he was just doing tow ups and stuff and it was fine for that, but a few times they had it on real big jobs and the thing is doing a wheely in the air and the truck just wasn't built to handle these super-duper catastrophic B-Train and Tri Axle trailer wrecks.

I'm no tow truck expert, but from casual observation I thought, ugh that truck is probably economically obsolete now a days, I mean heck in the late 1960's the Union Pacific DD40X was the biggest baddest thing around, but by the 1980's that thing was considered economically obsolete, and most of them were moved into storage and then they did bring them out in 1985 when Union Pacific had a big freight spike, but after that they were moved back into storage and then slowly one by one decommissioned.

If you notice season 4 starts off with John driving Bruce's old truck, but that didn't last very long and sure enough Jamie must have made some money that year, or had a line of credit available, because he bought that Western Star 50 ton Century tri axle super tower and you didn't see John to much in Bruce's old truck after that.

I don't know the states on those old Holmes 750 wreckers, but for front line equipment for Jamie Davis and all there big heavy rescue work, it's probably not enough.

 

You know what's funny is Jamie has a lot of nice brand new fancy stuff, but he also has a lot of older stuff that you see for like one season and then you don't see it again.

 

What were the payments on the Rotator? They had to be close to $11,000-$12,000 a month?

It certainly seemed like he expanded rather quickly.
Another question I have is the snow plows VSA uses are those automatics or stick shift? I know that might sound like a dumb question, but you never know now a days, with all the controls and stuff you have in the cabs of those trucks and what not, I could see that going either way. Where they have some that are autos and maybe some older units that are stick shift.

I know most of the municipalities around here there newer equipment is all automatic hell any more for like your standard Freightliner M2 single axle 15 ton snow plow the Alison 6 speed Automatic transmission is almost a standard feature.

 

When did those trucks go out of production?