Hayes Truck Parts Manuals PDF

History of Hayes Trucks

 The Canadian auto industry has never been able to compete with the United States auto industry. Moreover, the existing factories for the production of trucks or buses massively used components from the United States. It wasn't just nuts or small parts, it was often a set of trucks. True, they already had the “Made in Canada” stamp on them, but in fact they remained American cars. Today, the situation has not changed much, and yet some names and names that belong only to the state of Canada, such as Hayes, Pacific, MCI, Prevost, etc., will forever remain in memory.

 

Officially, the history of the Canadian company for the production of heavy road trucks begins in 1934, and according to the Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Trucks and Commercial Vehicles, it all started much earlier, back in 1921, when two friends D. Hayes and W. Anderson from Vancouver founded Hayes-Anderson Motor Co., Ltd. They were engaged in transportation on American trucks and, in addition, actively sold these trucks in their own country. At the beginning of the last century, Canada was largely an agrarian country, mechanical engineering of all kinds was just in its infancy. Northwest Canada at that time was actively trading in timber, which had to be removed from the plots.

Over time, Hayes and Anderson began to think about a truck of their own design, necessarily very powerful, reliable (there was nowhere to repair it) and with high traffic. It was decided to build a truck from reliable components, and the partners settled on the products of Continental, Hercules and Leyland. Bridges and gearboxes were especially reliable from the British, so until the 1950s Canadians bought these units only from them. But the engines were used mainly by “local”, the most powerful ones - Caterpillar, Cummins, Detroit Diesel and only one foreign one - Rolls-Royce. The first cars were created for the export of timber, they were reliable and easy to manufacture, as evidenced by the copies that have survived to this day.

 

In 1934, when the company was renamed Hayes Manufactu-ring Co., Ltd., it abandoned the production of road trucks and focused on the development and production of timber trucks, heavy tractors and trucks for work in the northern regions. From the mid-1930s, all Hayes vehicles became diesel. We can say that by that time the company had found an unfilled niche in the market of special automotive equipment. Its main conveyor already looked different - only timber trucks, and for special vehicles (there were a small number of them) a separate small workshop was built.

In the 1940s, the company's specialists took care of the appearance of their timber trucks. Cabins have acquired a fine appearance (series 300) and, one might even say, their own style. However, the trend did not last long: stamped parts turned out to be many times more expensive than parts made using a bending machine and rollers, that is, the company returned to a primitive cabin manufacturing technology, but much cheaper.

 

World War II did not affect the Canadian company, but internal conflicts between leading engineers and management ended with the fact that a group of leading Hayes specialists left the company and organized their own production of trucks. The Hayes management showed wisdom, not interfering with new competitors and even helping them in some way - the market was still not saturated with trucks of this kind. The new company was named Pacific Truck & Trailer Co., but we will talk about it in a separate publication.

 The pinnacle of Hayes engineering was the creation of the super-heavy truck of the W-HDX series, which was used to transport unique goods, such as parts of a reactor for a Spanish nuclear power plant. Despite the fact that the car was equipped with a Cummins VTA 1700-C engine with an HP 700 power. and a 9-speed automatic transmission Clark CL 18 820-9, when transporting the frame of the main unit, two such vehicles were needed (one in front, the second in the back). The famous American company Mack took a direct part in the design of these tractors, which, having appreciated the modest capabilities of Hayes at that time (40 ... 50 vehicles per year), in 1969 acquired a solid stake in its shares. Over the next few years, Mack trucks with large Hayes emblems began to appear on the roads of Canada and the United States. These were both cab-over-engine trucks and bonneted vehicles.