Here is somewhat of an interesting aritcle from the internet. I just copy and pasted it, I figured it should go on this thread.
Hayes Were Pioneer Logging Truck Builders
The heritage of the Hayes family in BC's forest industry goes back much further than 1956 when Donald and Harriet Hayes started logging on Vancouver Island. It stretches back to 1925 when Douglas Hayes-Donald's father and the grandfather of the company's current Hayes Forest management team-was first involved in a truck manufacturing company.
Hayes was in the parts business in Vancouver and it was a natural progression from there to assembling trucks. Over the next several decades, Hayes broke new ground in West Coast truck logging, manufacturing heavy trucks for the tough coastal logging roads, and the Hayes truck became a regular feature of the coastal logging scene in BC. From 1952 on, the company was known as Hayes Trucks until Mack Trucks bought it out in 1969.
The last one was built in 1975, but the role the trucks played in the pioneering days of truck logging is a fascinating look at how far the industry has come and the hard work it took to get there. Hayes trucks were built to fill a void in the type of logging truck being used in the woods in the pioneering years of truck logging. These early trucks had a bunk and trailer system surprisingly similar to what you see today.
The difference was that before Douglas Hayes adapted a rotating bunk to Hayes trucks-which allowed the trailer to track in the path of the truck-logging trucks were equipped with rub irons that could make hauling logs frustrating and dangerous. "You had skid plates under the bunk so you had steel to steel but when you went around a real sharp corner you'd get bunkbound," explains Steve Drybrough, who restores Hayes logging trucks on Vancouver Island and has been driving logging trucks for 31 years. "The trailer would drop off the rub iron then you'd have a hell of a time getting it back on. A turntable system eliminated most of the bunk-bound."
The rotating bunk was an innovation at the time and is still the basis on which logging trucks operate. Such innovations were light years ahead of truck logging operations in the 1920s and 1930s, when three- and five-tonne trucks were used in rugged coastal conditions to haul logs. Fred Meier, who lives in Campbell River, BC and whose passion is old logging trucks, used to drive some of those trucks and has lots of stories about brakes and some of the hills.
"They had two guys driving the truck, one of them running the brake handle and the other one drove the truck," he recounts. "If you took a right hand turn, it slackened the brake off and when it turned to the left, it tightened the brake up. So this guy running the brake was forever tightening when we were on a right hand turn and loosening like crazy when we were doing a left hand turn." The drivers got used to it but Meier remembers the close calls. "I had the odd runaway but we had spots where if we had a problem, we'd bank the truck off into a bluff or a ditch or onto the runaway spur," he says.
Some of the early logging trucks only had about 65 horsepower. If you had 130 horsepower, you had big power. These days, with truckers facing longer haul distances out in the bush, there has been a push on for more power. Power has gone from 430 horsepower to an average of 550 to 600 hp.
