Teletrac Navman Fleet Focus

Lots of people who love trucks reckon they were “born in a truck.” 

In 25 years of writing about trucks and truckies, I’ve never once struck someone who really did arrive here on a truck seat!

But in Dave Smith’s case, the actual, solid-gold truth – not a mere figure of speech – is that he’s been spending quality time in trucks since he was a newborn baby.

The third-generation owner of the modest Smiths Transport in Port Albert (a tiny settlement about eight kilometres west of Wellsford) spent his first full day in a truck when he was just three weeks old!

And by the time he was a toddler, Dave (along with baby sister Helena) routinely we... ... 

It’s a quarry, Jim, but not as we generally know it. OK, the stuff that comes out of a typical quarry might sometimes start out as solid rock, but by the time it has been processed the individual bits won’t be all that big.

Not so the output of the Wainihinihini quarry (20km inland from Kumara on SH73) operated by Greymouth-based MBD Contracting.

These are seriously big goolies, lumps of granite that weigh an average of five tonnes each – but for some specific applications like seaport protection walls they can go as high as 15-tonnes a stone! In that case they are carted on semi tipulators, and there have been times when a single rock has made up the whole... ... 

In 2005 when New Zealand Truck & Driver featured the distinctive white, blue and silver trucks of G.J. Sheldrake Ltd in the November issue Fleet Focus, company founder Graham Sheldrake was unsure if his son Mathew (Mat) would move into the Tokoroa-based family business.

Mat was 21 at the time and working as a fabricator-welder at Total Transport Engineering while Graham was keeping a fleet of eight loggers and five general freight trucks busy during one of the cyclical tougher times for the logging industry.

G.J. Sheldrake Ltd had just turned 25-years-old when that Fleet Focus feature was published. Almost two decades later, Graham is now retired f... ...