A Very Special K

In-depth

20 Oct

There are always a couple of hundred trucks at truck shows, and most of them nominate themselves for the various awards on offer. There are also many that would be considered worthy winners - ranging from almost brand new to what some would call ‘ancient’.

Judging is not a job that this writer would like to have. Judging is not based upon bling. “It is how the overall vehicle is presented,” said one. “Think of a car concourse. A speck of dirt can lose you points. What’s under the bonnet and how that is presented is just as important as the polish on the paint. A good judge will poke into places that would go unseen and unnoticed by most folk.”

And so it was that on the judging criteria, the winning truck for 2019 at The Koroit Truck Show held in Western Victoria was a magic 1984 Cab over Kenworth K100 owned by David Derham.

Dave’s been in trucks all his working life - some 50 years - and is still operating today. The family business, now run by son, Andrew operates 40 trucks based at Lara, near Colac in Victoria, running tippers. “We gave up the interstate work a couple of years ago and it hasn’t been a bad move because we’re flat out all the time.”

The family runs 28 Kenworths within that fleet under the banner of Derham Transport. “In the early days it was just a partnership with my wife which is why the door of the K100 sports the insignia DJ & GL Derham, Little River.”

Dave bought the truck new in 1984 when he was subcontracting for a company called Aftrans, a subsidy of ICI, pulling gas tankers on interstate. Aftrans had ammonia plants in Newcastle and Brisbane and Dave would load LPG out of Melbourne and travel all over the countryside.

“Because it was gas it was 24 hours a day, seven days a week, loading and unloading wherever we went. We did a lot of kilometres in those days. It was fairly quick and we used to get away with that back then. It’s an 892 with a 13 speed over -drive Road Ranger. It has 3.7 difs in it which is pretty quick. It was good for 150 Kph flat out in the early days.”

The truck has not always been in the family, with Dave letting it go in the late 1990’s, when it had done around 1.1 million kilometres. It was repainted and spent the next fifteen years doing container work which added another half million to the odometer.

Some trucks have a way of tugging at the heart strings, and for Dave it was his old K100. So he bought it back. It had been repainted in the previous owners colours of brown and cream which was never going to do. “What you see here now is how it came from the factory. We bought it right back to where it was when it was brand-new. It was a good colour scheme then and it’s come up a treat again now.”

And a great colour scheme it is. The white body with orange banding, bisected with white pin striping makes for a very pretty truck – if one is allowed to call a truck ‘pretty’.

“When we bought it, we needed a white truck with orange bands for the company that we were working for. We came up with this design in conjunction with the Kenworth salesman. It was a good fit and did the job well.”

“Stephen Thomas is the guy that rebuilt it for us. He’s a friend of my son, Andrew who he went to school with. Steve is basically a mechanic, but he is also into doing some restoration. He took it right back to where it needed to be and we did everything that we could possibly do inside and out. Mechanically it is spot on.”

Dave is only 71 so doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘retirement’. He still works every day, often doing several hundred kilometres per day in one of the trucks when he’s filling in. “Luckily I’m still fit and well. I love the trucks and I still love driving them. I’ll keep going until I can’t do it anymore.”

He has no intention of keeping the K100 as purely a show truck. “They say, use it or lose it. I’m going to put a semi-tipper on this one. We have our own sand quarry so we’ll give her a little bit of work, doing the odd load and getting her out on the country roads. We’ll have her blowing a bit of smoke and making a bit of noise and let the young blokes see what the two strokes were all about. I may be 71 on the outside but I’m still 18 in the head.”

We’re glad you feel that way Dave, because it’s folks such as yourself that reflect the industry as a whole in a great light.