Looking for tow boom plans

[greymack]

Anyone have plans for building a vintage tow truck or wrecker deck for 1 ton trucks?

[highway]

How vintage George??

[greymack]

Hi Highway well any year from 1930's to 70's

[highway]

I don't know iff this would be too new or not, but Miller Industries site has some service manuals in PDF format like this one:

http://www.millerind.com/parts/pdfs/h440_parts.pdf

Here's a link to their home page also, to look through the different manuals like the one in the pervious link, just mouse over the "Parts" tab and select the brand, and then it will list the available service manuals.

http://www.millerind.com/index.php

[JamesW]

A little off topic (but still same subject). Since the introduction of the wheel lift, is the sling still used, or is it merely for decoration purposes now?

Great link btw, think I'm gonna build me a modern wrecker now.

[highway]

A little off topic (but still same subject). Since the introduction of the wheel lift, is the sling still used, or is it merely for decoration purposes now?

Great link btw, think I'm gonna build me a modern wrecker now.

Well James, that even depends on IF you can find a sling on one anymore. I worked driving wreckers back in 2001, and not one of the trucks in the fleet had a sling attached, just wheel lifts and winching cables. The closest thing they had to slings were two old heavy wreckers (a 74 White-Western Star and a 74 Mack) that had a sling-style towbar, but the one things those trucks were used for was heavy recovery. All the normal tow jobs went to the 94 Freightliner that had an axle lift, mainly because of the same reasons slings are more or less gone, because of all the plastic bumpers! Unless there would be something between the attachment chains and the frame of the car to keep the sling from coming in contact with any part of the plastic bumper, say bye bye bumper! :lol:

[JamesW]

The reason I asked was because we have around 6 companies around here, 2 of which have a very large fleet, and every single truck has a sling. I knew the reason for the wheel lift was because of the newer cars and their plastic bumpers. Since the wheel lift can be used on all types of passenger cars and trucks I haven't seen a sling used and wondered if they had other uses for them, or if it was just an icon thing that was always related to wreckers?

[highway]

I don't know if still really any real use for slings other than maybe hauling wrecks from a scene or, like one company here, using them to haul cars off to the junkyard. Even at that, their yard truck with the sling is a late 70s or early 80s Chevy, everything else in their fleet from the 94 F350 to their brand new wrecker is slingless.

I was doing some checking through the various body manufactures on the Miller site, and it seems most of the bodies that don't have a one piece boom/wheellift all do have slings listed, but only as optional equipment. Of the ones I looked at, none had a sling standard.