A Happy New Year to you on this final week of 2020! As promised in Channel 19 last week, find above a video of some of the details of longtime owner-operator Germann Soethâs back-up power unit.
Heâd been slowing restoring the rig from scrap since purchasing it from a local yard near his Frederick, Maryland, home base a few years ago, he told me in October. Soeth had mentioned the cabover when I first met him in 2019 at Thatâs a Big 10-4 on D.C. in the nationâs capital. Regular readers will recall his long-running conventional Kenworth W900 from my coverage of it and his one-truck business from that time. This October, he didnât have the W9 out on the National Mall because it had suffered a breakdown that he details in the video.
Luckily, he was but a couple weeks and some suspension work away from getting the small-block 350 Cummins-powered cabover in shape to pull its first loads since being left for scrap.
A few more views:
Extensive work on the interior to reconstruct the rigâs doghouse, which was in bad shape, Soeth says, offered the opportunity to learn âhow to fiberglassâ in efforts to shape the underlying structure.
The restored interior preserves as much as possible the original components, Soeth added.
A personal thank-you to all who reached out directly in the wake of the downtown Nashville bombing, which woke pretty much everyone in my neighborhood here, no doubt. Being a couple miles away, we were shielded from immediate impacts, though the blastâs downing of AT&Tâs communications infrastructure had impacts far and wide, as any of you traveling through the region this past weekend may have found.
Some in the trucking community saw more direct impacts â my TruckersNews.com colleague Davis Hollis penned a story yesterday in part about a Nashville downtown resident and Eaton Corp. rep who lost quite a lot in the blast. Summit Truck Group sales director Patrick Mendenhall has organized an online fund-raiser to help.
