The character that RZ is talking about left a trail of un-sober stories behind talked about far and wide. When he was sober he was a good mechanic-Carl Prosser.
Truck Shop
He was most definitely a character, the first time we worked together was in the mid 80's fixing junk for Brown Brothers Feeds in Royal City. Their "drivers" tore it out faster than you could rebuild/replace it, brakes, clutches, transmissions.... It was job security big time. BBF had a guy of their own but he was swamped, so they called Carl and then they found me, at the time I was trying to get my foot in the door with a few outfits for some regular business and that worked out quite well for me.
One memory that is burned into my brain is that of Carl cleaning out an 8V92 block with an air siphon gun using GASOLINE and with a cigarette dangling from his lip
. I... went to lunch at 9am that day.
Later he started calling me to do heavy work and welding for his customers, that got me even more business. We loaned tools back and forth for quite a few years, but as he got older he started to give me some of his heavy tools. I still have a batch of 1" drive sockets and odd Cat dozer type specialty wrenches from him.
The last job we worked together was a small Wabco scraper, he had taken on the job of repairing the old 5spd Fuller trans in the thing without realizing it was a strange obsolete model. I hunted all over the us for parts with zero results and most used parts were junk too:bangh. So we ended up welding stuff up and doing our own machining. That machine is still working about 100 hrs a year.
It was only about 3 months later when I got the news he went to bed and never woke up. :angel