Fire Truck Food Truck Upgrades
Still working on the fire truck, we visited a recent event, where the inclement weather caused problems to the vendors. The mud meant that pretty much anything heavier than a bicycle had to be recovered with winches and tows etc.
Coming from a funfair background we are used to having to do this. However, in the past, on a typical fairground the recovery was a co-operative affair. Everyone helped each other until we were all out.
Nowadays we tend to attend events where the vendors don’t have a common connection. As a result you may got an occasional helping hand, but often it becomes a bit of an everyman for themselves sort of affair.
Our Solution
What we came up with was upgrading our food truck with this;
This is a 10 tonne military spec recovery winch. Using a single snatch block it gives us a 20 tonne pull. Should be ok for the roughly 7 tonne weight of the fire truck.
Obviously it needed mounting somewhere on the truck. What we ended up designing was a bumper mount. Or to be more precise, we had a heavy duty mount fabricated to bolt into the front chassis rails. The fact that on US fire engines these tend to extend two feet forward of the cab made it much easier.
Chassis Rail Mount
The next issue was mounting the hook. It needed to come through the front bumper. Unfortunately the middle of the bumper is right where the number plate is mounted (licence plate for our American cousins), which necessitated moving it. Or did, until we found an alternative. Seems the Yanks do this sort of thing regularly, and make a nifty flip up licence plate mount that allows a roller fairlead to be used just by, well, flipping the plate up!
To finish off we added a new American style plate and a hook mount. Along with a selection of 10 tonne recovery straps and shackles to extend the usable reach of the winch system.
Oh, and we added quick change mounts to the number plate holder, so we can add custom printed plates as a little extra touch.
Next step is to source and add some recovery track mats, much easier to winch a vehicle onto mats and drive it off rather than winch it all the way
