It was bound to happen sooner or later. I bought a retired fire truck. Having worked for fire-related publications for 25 years, being a firefighter and a fire chief’s son, on top of being a gearhead, it was just a matter of time before I had my own red rig in the driveway.
It’s just a little brush truck, a converted 1952 M37 Dodge. For those unfamiliar with the vehicle, think three-quarter-ton pickup, overbuilt for military use. My wife thinks it’s a cute little truck and has come up with some possible names for it that I won’t get into for the sake of my own dignity.
It’s a long story about how I got it, but essentially it was decommissioned from my fire station after a period of not being used. It runs and drives great and, with a little work, will pump water again from its 200-gallon tank.
The thing that strikes me about it is how well it’s built. Granted, it’s military grade, but it is built like a tank, no pun intended. It weighs north of 6,000 pounds.
The truck came with some equipment that is also remarkably heavy and overbuilt. In the cab, I found a beautiful Santa Rosa 1½-inch chrome-plated bronze nozzle. It’s compact, maybe 6 inches long, with quarter-turn paddles for on/off control with no bail. It has roses cast into the barrel that serve no purpose I can deduce other than decoration.
Besides the sheer beauty of it, its heft is remarkable. It weighs more than six pounds, which is a lot for such a small nozzle. Last year, I did a video with a sleek, modern nozzle, much larger than my Santa Rosa nozzle and that weighed just a tick over four pounds, made out of aluminum. And it might not sound like much, but after you flow water for a while, and your arms get worn out, every pound feels like a hundred.
Since humans discovered fire, we have been trying to figure out ways to use it, control it, and fight it and, over centuries of trial and error, we’ve come up with ever-increasing ways to harness and fight it.
I think about the decades of research and development that go into the products firefighters use every day as illustrated by my nozzle and how it compares to the modern device. Both were built to be durable and do the job. Manufacturers have figured out a way, however, to make them lighter and more efficient. As beautiful as the Santa Rosa nozzle is, I wouldn’t want to advance a line with it or hang onto it for hours. The weight of the nozzle alone is fatigue inducing. And manufacturers, many of them having firefighting experience themselves, understand the need to make things as lightweight as possible. Therefore, the Santa Rosa nozzle will be retired to a display shelf in my office as a reminder of where we came from and a tip of the hat to the firefighters who used it for years.
My little fire truck also has a 300-gallon-per-minute pump that’s a cast-iron behemoth. It’s well-built and does the job well, but it’s SO heavy that it serves better permanently mounted to the truck rather than as a portable pump as designed. Right next to it is a newer pump with a lightweight Honda engine and a cast aluminum pump housing. That truly is a portable pump as it doesn’t take two men and a boy to lift it. Again, smart engineers and innovative manufacturers figured out a way to make something just as good, but half, or less, the weight.
Under the front seat of my truck, which my wife thinks should be named Benji the Brush Truck, is an enormous Motorola two-way radio, bigger than a milk crate and probably made in the 1970s or earlier. The remote radio control head is about the size of a high-school textbook. It likely has tubes in the base and produces a scratchy signal that barely reaches dispatch.
Today, Motorola produces radios less than the size of a paperback book, the whole thing, with capabilities of reaching virtually anywhere on the planet using LTE technology.
Even the hose and hand tools on my beast are heavy by comparison to modern equipment. Ironically, all the stuff on Benji, yeah, I might be warming to the idea of naming our truck, was state-of-the-art when it was made. It was the most modern and best available for the time.
Manufacturers are continuously refining, reinventing, and improving equipment to keep firefighters safe and more efficient. God bless them for doing so because I think I’d blow out a spinal disk, suffer a hernia, if I had to use the stuff from 50 years ago. I’d much rather geek out about firematic collectables than use them.
