The Famous Kauff “Mean Machine” Gets Restored
I read an article in one of Bill Jackson’s newsletters during the early 1980s that the 1966 Kauff “Mean Machine,” a fabled Holmes 850 fitted to an Autocar chassis that once was part of the truck stable of Kauff’s of South Florida, was coming to the UK. It was my dream to own and operate one, but it was way, way out of my reach.
A fellow AVRO member and old friend Ivan Chant, owner of Berkley Towing of southwest England, eventually acquired it after it changed hands several times. Ivan worked it for a while, and took it to local trucking shows. I tried several times to buy it from him but he did not want to sell. His stock answer was, “Where am I going to get anything that is as powerful as the 850?”
The Autocar, which once worked the canals of South Florida, is hard to maneuver in awkward places and spare parts are difficult to find, but I could live with that just for the power of the thing! One day Ivan called and said he was retiring and closing his business. All his trucks, equipment and stock were to be auctioned, including the Autocar. At that time, there were only two other Holmes 850s in the country and this one was for the getting.
I had in mind what I thought it was worth, and what I could afford. I ended up the highest bidder, doubling my original bid ceiling. Aileen, my long-suffering wife and financial guru, was not amused when she learned how much I paid for it. “We have perfectly good 750s. Why do we want that?” she remarked. But, at last, we had a Holmes 850 with the Autocar that had such history.
The dream soon began to fade after we worked it on a couple of big wrecks. Each time we had mechanical failures – PTO/U joint snapped, compressor failure and more – not the sort of thing you need when the road is closed and traffic is backed up in either direction for 10 miles and the police and highways want to reopen the road ASAP.
We did quite a few other jobs with it, including some big winch-outs, but it was unreliable with small stuff, something that we cannot have in our business. Following another breakdown, I withdrew it from service and put it in the shop to fix once and for all. My son Graham started to strip it down, and the deeper we dug the more we found. The panels holding the oil tanks were badly rusted, door skins were rusted, the cab floor was rusted and holed, the heater air box in front of the windscreen was rusted and holed. We ended up fabricating new panels and welding them in. It was turning into a complete strip down – shot blasting the frame rails and everything attached to them.
The job had become a marathon. We had more important jobs to do on other trucks and projects, so the poor Autocar got buried under other stuff, turning into another Coupland unfinished project. Years passed and nothing got done until one day a post appeared on Tow 411 wanting to know its whereabouts. My dear friend Nick Ovenden responded, and I suddenly realized the significance of the truck and historic importance of the “Mean Machine.” It was coincidental that we needed to move the Autocar into another building, providing an incentive to get working on it again. I must say, at one stage I almost cut it up for scrap when an export customer wanted to buy the crane but not the chassis.
Fortunately, common sense prevailed and we pressed forward with the restoration. I posted progress on Tow 411, generating a huge amount of encouragement from the membership. Gradually, it started to take shape. We made a new subframe on which to mount the sleeper cab. All four corners of the sleeper were damaged so we cut them away and fabricated new. We made a new floor and wheel arch panels, and completely retrimmed the inside. The truck wiring was old and rotten so we made and installed a new wiring harness. The exhaust was almost non-existent apart from the stacks, so we made a new one from the bends and flex joint from a Scania system and made a silencer out of an air tank with a five-inch pipe welded in either end.
There were many occasions when I did not have time or the enthusiasm to continue, and let it go between occasional bursts of enthusiasm that lasted a couple of weeks. But after 22 years we put diesel in the tanks, water in the radiator, fitted a couple of new batteries, primed the fuel pump a couple of times, cranked it over and it fired up … filling the shop with smoke. After sorting out a couple of minor water, fuel and air leaks, the Cummins engine settled down and was running reeeeal good.
The power steering would not function at all and it really had me scratching my head for a while. Then I recalled that a few years earlier I was walking across the workshop with the power steering pump and I dropped it, smashing the cast iron pulley. I made a new pulley on the lathe and fitted it, but I didn’t know that when I dropped it, the drive gear inside the pump was broken. When I ran it, bits of shrapnel got into the Vickers steering cylinder and jammed the spool valves. Replacing the pump was easy but the fun started when we were unable to locate a replacement steering cylinder.
We took it apart and built up the slider with braze and had it re-chromed, adapted some similar ram seals we had in the stores, and at last it was fixed. It drove very well on the road – the brakes and Jake all working perfectly. It was ready to roll. We have taken it to various trucking shows and have done demonstrations including rollovers with trucks and trailers, double decker buses, etc. – old school equipment working with state-of-the-art equipment. It was very nostalgic, but it used muscles I forgot I had and, boy, did I ache for days.
My sincere thanks go out to a few key people: Adam Burke of the Autocar Preservation Society, Richard Kauff of Kauff’s Towing, Bill Ludwig of Ernie’s Towing and Ron Parish of Tow 411 who gave me technical and historic information and tons of encouragement. Thanks most of all to my sons Graham and Matt for their endless enthusiasm and help, and putting up with numerous parts lying around on pallets for years.
So what am I going to do with the Autocar now? We will take it to shows and conduct demonstrations, the odd winch-out, etc. Eventually, we’ll loan it to a museum. To my knowledge there are only about six functional four-axle Autocars of that model in existence, none in the UK or Europe.
– John Coupland, Coupland Heavy Towing