Vehicle ID Please

[Ed Storey]

Originally Posted by rob love

The cargo box on it is different from any that I have seen. It is missing the angular re-enforcement over the wheel wells. It also seems to have a straight up exhaust stack, missing the curve on the top of the Cdn trucks. I wonder if this was an early purchase from US stocks?
It also has some funny mirrors, but likely a locally sourced improvement over the little 5" round mirrors that came standard on those trucks.

I don't know of any US manufactured M135s that were used by Canada other than the ones issued to our forces in Korea and Japan. As far as I know, unlike the M62 Wreckers and M38A1 Jeeps used in Korea, the M135s were not shipped back to Canada as there was already enough domestic production to fill our needs. I suspect therefore that the RCAF M135CDN is an early Canadian production model.

[rob love]

I did see a US produced very early bowser at a local deuce graveyard. It had the prefix XM on the model number, but was clearly CFR'd. I had a look back 13 years here on MLU and here is what I wrote about that truck at the time:

I found one cab had the data plate of the XM222 water truck. Serial number was somewhere around 0015, with a build date of 1952, and the crossed cannon ordnance corps inspectors mark stamped on the data plate. Obviously an early American made truck, but interestingly had a Canadian CFR number on the dash, with a 1954 model year.

Perhaps we had some trials M135, and the army, in typical fashion, got rid of the non-conforming trucks by generously passing them on to the airforce. Or we may have simply mirrored the US early production. I note the airforce deuce does not have the hi-lo bow system in it's sideracks.

[Ed Storey]

Good point, as there is certainly the potential for that RCAF vehicle to have been a pre-production vehicle. It is amazing that there is still so much to learn about the story behind the Canadian M Series vehicles.

[Ed Storey]

I did a little checking through some of my manuals and discovered these M135CDN images were used to illustrate the Data Summaries. This one on the March 1952 edition,

M135CDN Truck ECC 124101 copy.jpg

and this one one the March 1972 edition.

M135CDN Truck 56376 ECC 124101 copy.jpg

[rob love]

Interesting. Both boxes are the early type. The first truck has the low tarp on it, where the second truck has the hi-lo adjustable tarp.

I'll have to keep an eye during my travels for the early box, and see what serial range they fall in. Inquiring minds want to know.

[Ed Storey]

There is a strong possibility that the vehicle used on the 1972 Data Summary was a LETE vehicle which could perhaps explain why an early box vehicle was used on the publication as they held some strange vehicle variants.

I am sure there is a landfill somewhere outside of Ottawa filled with the documentation on the M135/M211CDN vehicles.