On a recent trip to Oregon, I encountered two vehicles with familiar names … but quite unlike their namesakes. A few Internet searches revealed that both were in fact locally manufactured products. I managed to get a few pictures of the first one, which I encountered on a hike near Clatskanie, Oregon (home of the recently featured Vandicraft camper), but for the second, I had to use a photo pulled off the Internet, as I haven’t mastered the art of shooting quick pictures while driving.
Pictured above is a Thunderbird, which I learned is a “swing yarder”, used to pull logs up to 2000 feet from where they were felled, with 7/8″ steel cables. This T-Bird was manufactured by the Ross Corporation of Eugene, Oregon (also the home of CC!) until the company was sold in the late ’90’s. This TSY255 version was typically powered by a Cummins NT straight six, or a Detroit Diesel 8V92 V8.
The next vehicle is actually one that is quite common, at least in the western US, but for the first time I noticed the name emblazoned across the hood, “Oregon Roadrunner”. Beep-Beep. The Oregon Roadrunner is manufactured by Sunny “D” Manufacturing of Klamath Falls. It’s a “hay squeeze”, which lifts and transports large stacks of hay bales by squeezing the ones on the bottom. There is also a similar product, manufactured in Manteca, California, apparently known as a Manteca Roadrunner, or just a Roadrunner. The white one pictured above (courtesy of BidCaller.com) has a Cummins diesel and Allison transmission – no 383 or 426 Hemi or TorqueFlite in this bird. It sold at auction in May, 2018 for $120,000 US dollars.
Neat finds, thank you for sharing.
Interesting stuff. The only other Thunderbird I can think of is the bum wine. Which would probably go great with Newport cigarettes, so there is another FoMoCo/Mopar pairing that could work.
This would be an interesting take off point on other products that shared names of well-known cars. There have been lots of Century boats over the years and Piper built a twin engine aircraft called the Aztec.
There was a Krupp Mustang, pictured below, prior to Ford’s pony car.
The biggest Krupp truck model back then was the Titan. Now that is a common name for all kinds of heavy-duty vehicles throughout the years: Volvo Titan, Terex Titan, Nissan Titan, Mack Titan, Titan farm tractors, Titan heavy-haulage tractors and vintage International-Harvester Titan farm tractors. Maybe I forgot a few…
There was also a White Mustang long before Ford had theirs.
Whoa! Quite off-topic, but that is a glorious-looking rig there.
Even further off, my grandad was involved in designing a house for the Krupp family, with (allegedly) wider doors to accomodate Big Bertha, the inheritor and owner of the business, and no small lady. He was an architect at the time (’20’s Berlin) but the wider doors thing might be an uncheckable myth, I suspect. Perhaps a joke amongst the builders. At any rate, I suppose a Titan is a better name for huge things than a Bertha.
And now we shall resume relevant transmission.
There may be other Aztecs, but I suspect there will always be only one “Aztek”.
The Thunderbird name gets around. I think Ford had to license the name from Triumph Motorcycles since they used it first. In turn Triumph ended up licensing Bonneville from Pontiac.
BSA also used Rocket as a model name, shared with Oldsmobile engines and Triumph had TR-5 TR-6 and TR-7 motorcycles made roughly the same time as the Triumph cars.
I even know one internal example, the first Honda Odyssey was a 4 wheel ATV, whose name was subsequently applied to the corporate minivan.
Racetrack names are often shared, Monza was both Chevrolet and Moto Guzzi and Daytona can be a Dodge or a Triumph. More obscurely, Laverda and Ducati both made a Montjuich.
Well, “Thunderbird” has always raised an amused eyebrow for me, because in Australia, an old name for the single, telephone booth-sized outdoor toilet was “thunderbox”, for reasons that might be obvious.
So a thunderBIRD? Oh, Lord. Watch out below.
Mazda also used the Titan name on one of its trucks, and a locally built minibus on a Hino chassis used the Road Runner name during the 1980s.