Cutting your teeth in the Otira Gorge is a baptism by fire for any new truck, but that is exactly where this latest member of the Bridgestone Million Mile Club started its career. It was registered in 2007 with the T Croft Ltd fleet of Stillwater on the outskirts of Greymouth; John Doolan was handed the keys to the shiny new 9800i International.

First built as a 8×4 rigid curtainsider pulling a matching four-axle trailer, the mighty Inter was kept busy with general freight. When the phone rang at the T Croft office in the morning, that was what DYG423 was doing that day.

The 9800i put in a good 12 years of service in this configuration. Then, in 2019, it found itself parked in the yard of AW Trucks in Kerepehi on the Hauraki Plains. Now, it was minus its trailer and curtainsider body, so the team at AW Trucks set to reconfiguring the 9800i into a 10×4. First, the existing Raydan suspension set was swapped out for a new IROS pack and a Hendrickson tag axle. Next, it was the fitting of a new Sermac 5RZ46 concrete pumping body. The Sermac is an impressive piece of kit, with the capability to pump concrete just over 45m vertically and boasts a horizontal reach of a touch over 41m.

Once commissioned, DYG423 in her new guise made her way back to the mainland into Mark Garvey’s fleet at Complete Concrete Pumping, operating out of Rolleston. Mark could not be happier with the 9800i. “It is as solid as a rock, a fantastic platform to carry the pump. It has a great tare weight, and any parts for it are straight off the shelf. We know it had a rebuild while at T Croft’s at some stage, but as far as we know, she is still running the original 18-speed manual Roadranger,” he explains.

With more than 1,700,000km on the clock, DYG423 is certainly kept busy on various construction sites throughout the South Island, pumping concrete into all those hard-to-reach places where the good Green’s handyman barrow just won’t cut the mustard. And with her West Coast pedigree, we are sure she will continue to do so for years to come.