Jeff Sparks still has the same service truck as five years ago but has collected many more tools. Photo: Dan Anderson
Confessed “tool junkie” Jeff “Sparky” Sparks has expanded his obsession with tools and service vehicles since he and his service truck were featured in the first Spec My Truck story in inaugural issue of Service Truck Magazine back in 2014. Sparks is a field tech for Van Wall Equipment in Perry, Iowa. He still works out of the 14-foot-long Service Trucks International (STI) service body mounted on a 2000 Kenworth, as detailed in that story, but has expanded both his tool supply and his support system.
Tool-wise, bigger is always better in Sparks’ mind. Since we last visited him, he has acquired
Co-workers named this 40-ton PosiLock puller “Alice.”Photo: Dan Anderson
quite a few hefty tools to deal with ever-larger farm equipment. He’s added “Alice,” a 40-ton PosiLock puller to help disassemble final drives on combines and four-wheel-drive tractors.
“One of the other mechanics decided the puller was big enough to have its own name,” Sparks says. “He decided to call her Alice, and the name stuck. They’ll call and ask me, ‘Can we borrow Alice? We need her back in the shop.’”
After wrestling to manually tighten Alice, Sparks vowed to spend the extra money when buying other wheel pullers and now opts for air-over-hydraulic tools. The result is several air/hydraulic two- and three-jaw PosiLock pullers rated up to 25 tons in his shop that he loads into his truck when needed. His shop at home also stores high-lift air/hydraulic jacks and jackstands for lifting and safely supporting high-clearance sprayers that carry 1,200 gallon spray tanks and spray booms that stretch 120-feet wide. Those 60,000-pound-capacity jacking systems can start lifting at six-and-a-half feet.
“The frames on some of those sprayers are right at six or seven feet off the ground, so I needed some way to safely jack and support them,” he says.
Retrieving and repairing mega-sprayers that have accidentally driven into gullies or road ditches
Army-surplus wrecker boasts 20,000 pounds of lifting and winching capabilities.Photo: Dan Anderson
was the motivation for Sparks’s first mega, non-tool investment. A fan of military vehicles, he discovered online a 1970 Army-surplus six-wheel-drive military wrecker designed for lifting or winching military vehicles. The massive wrecker has an 855 Cummins engine, a front winch rated at 20,000 pounds, and a crane that extends to 18 feet and rated to lift up to 20,000 pounds.
“That’s according to the lift chart in the operator’s station,” Sparks laughs. “In my experience it will lift way, way more than that. Right now it’s not street legal, but I’ve used it to help some of my (rural) neighbors do some pretty heavy lifting. My plan is to get it street legal, then use it for really heavy work at my job.”
Further online shopping led Sparks to purchase an Army-surplus mobile mechanic’s trailer, designed for repairing battle tanks and construction equipment in the field. He had the fifth wheel trailer with fold-out sides hauled to his rural acreage and discovered that for $4,200 he had purchased not only the trailer with an onboard three-phase generator powered by a 298-cubic-inch White/Hercules diesel engine, but a 26-inch metal lathe with mill attachment, a built-in 50-ton hydraulic press, a half-inch drill press, arc welder, and an I-beam out the back of the trailer with a 1,500-pound chain hoist for moving heavy components inside the trailer for repairs.
“The fun part was when I started opening the built-in tool chests and cabinets,” he says. “They
This 100-ton air/hydraulic jack was just one of the high-value tools stashed in the military trailer’s drawers. Photo: Dan Anderson
were full of tools. There was a 17-1/2 ton hydraulic bearing puller/installer, a full set of one-inch sockets up to 3-1/8-inches, a 100-ton hydraulic jack, seven different air-over-hydraulic jacks, drill bits up to 1-1/2 inches, a pin puller for pulling track pins on D6 through D9 Cats — they sold it without emptying the tools out.”
Sparks plans to buy a fifth-wheel dolly so he can pull the mobile mechanic’s trailer with the receiver hitch on either his Van Wall Equipment service truck or his military wrecker.
“It seems like farm equipment is getting bigger and bigger, and the wrecks or problems farmers get into keep getting bigger and bigger,” he says. “So the plan is to be able to take the mobile shop or the wrecker to a machine and have everything I need to fix anything from a rolled-over combine to a high-clearance sprayer stuck in a ditch with busted axles. I hate not having the tools I need, when I need them.”
He paused and grinned.
“And I like buying tools. The bigger the better.”
— Dan Anderson
Dan Anderson is a part-time freelance writer and full-time heavy equipment mechanic with more than 20 years of experience working out of service trucks. He is based in Bouton, Iowa.