56-year-old, Arizona-based Dean DeSantis and his wife, Theresa, built their initial business decades ago now in part in the well-known āWitches Innā 1985 Peterbilt 359 in which Theresa hauls to this day, leased to Long Haul Trucking. Dean, however, when they sold that initial, hazardous-waste-hauling business, went to work for the company that bought them out, spending upward of two decades with them.
I met Dean DeSantis on the site of the Guilty By Association Truck Show in Joplin, Mo., last month, and DeSantis remarked upon a verity of such an owner-operator-heavy show in the process of showing off the truck heās put together most recently and plans to haul flatbed in himself come Spring 2018: āIn the world of everybody building gliders, Iām a guy who kind of cuts across the grain a little bit,ā he says. Having helped manage the hazardous-waste ācorporate worldā fleet heās been working for over decades now, heās seen what he says is marked improvement in reliability and more in engines, particularly those built in the last two years.

When he made the decision ā a ācareer gambleā of a fashion, he says ā to begin prepping to return to the road himself, he specād this 2018 Peterbilt 389 with the 510-hp Paccar engine, in a sense hoping to show the way for younger operators coming into the business toward new equipment. ā2010-ā12 I had my own trials and tribulationsā with that era of equipment, he says in the video up top.

But āwith this updated engine, a 2018 model, with the one canisterā design of the diesel particulate filter/selective catalytic reduction system, āIām walking around here yesterday and everybodyās talking about deleting their DPFs and getting away from emissions, and Iām trying to do the opposite. Iām trying to show people that in todayās world, I think weāve got to embrace it.ā
Embracing it, in part, also means learning it and controlling it. āTrucks built in 2017 and ā18 now,ā he says, āare really much, much improved.ā

Provided, he says, the āstupid stuff,ā ancillary parts of the entire power system like sensors and wiring harnesses, donāt prove to be problematic longer-term.
In any case, take a run through some of the details of his power unit, which he took delivery of last fall in preparation for outfitting it with its 124-inch ARI sleeper later in Spring of 2018, after which Truck Rods at Peterbilt of Joplin laid on the paint scheme and other of the pieces.
A little more about the truck thatās not in the video follows in photo captions below.



