This is one clever Cat

It’s a story of good old kiwi number eight wire ingenuity….applied to new-age technology.

It all started a year or so ago, with three blokes sitting in an engineering shop in Cambridge – looking at a 6x4 Cat CT630 in for conversion into a twin-steer….and shaking their heads.

They were reflecting on the amount of work involved in relocating stuff to make room for the second steerer, as Gough Cat national truck manager Murray Kernohan explains: “We’re going ‘crikey, to put the axle there, all the fuel tanks have gotta come back, the exhaust system’s gotta be modified, we’ve got to make up a new step, we’ve got to put a battery box on….’

“It's incredibly expensive every time you put a spanner on them and change anything. The dollars just start racking up. The reality is you’re looking at not quite 50 grand.

“And we’re thinking, ‘crikey, it’d be so much easier (and a lot cheaper), from a conversion point of view, if we could just position the axle further back – because there’s a big chunk of clear chassis there.”

TSV Consultants senior engineer Marin Vujcich – one of the trio, along with Peter Wilkinson, boss of Wilkinson Engineering (which does the Cat conversions work) – said that, in fact, the regs on the two-metre maximum wheelbase for twin-steer axles had just been relaxed.

It was a bit of a “Eureka!” moment. It meant that, theoretically at least, the second steer axle could fit into the relatively empty space on the chassis – pushing the steer axles’ wheelbase out to three metres rather than the 2m of the seven or eight 8x4s built previously.

Watch the Trevor Test below:

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