How K&G Foods Keeps Mushrooms on the Move

The K&G Foods fleet is a busy one, with five Kenworth T300 straight trucks running the highway seven days a week out of Portage la Prairie, Man. It’s also a pretty new fleet, with one of the T3’s now into its second year and the others being just a few months old. And all of them are saving the company money on full-maintenance leases.

K&G operates a mushroom farm just west of Winnipeg and the trucks deliver their loads to customers in southern Manitoba, in Saskatoon and Regina to the west, and as far east as Thunder Bay, Ont. As well, they make frequent forays into North Dakota.

Payloads are not heavy, typically in the range of 10,000 pounds, so a mid-range truck seems to be a sensible choice even though K&G rigs rack up quite a few miles in the course of a year. One of the company’s previous trucks accumulated about 500,000 kilometres in just three years, though most do less than that.

Given that many of those trips are overnighters, however, K&G’s Doug Dezegn, manager of maintenance and purchasing, wanted three of the trucks to have sleeper boxes. Trouble was, Kenworth doesn’t offer a sleeper option on the T300. Kerry Davies of the PacLease franchise at Custom Truck Sales in Winnipeg wasn’t fazed. He arranged for 42-inch bunks to be taken off used trucks and then had them completely refurbished for fitting onto the K&G machines.

Winnipeg’s Intercontinental Truck Body installed the sleepers and built and installed the 26-foot aluminum bodies, which required lengthening the afterframe by about six feet. On the two trucks without sleepers, the “snaplock” aluminum boxes are 28 feet long.

Mid-Canada Thermo-King installed Thermo-King KDII 30SR heating/refrigeration units with Cycle Sentry start/stop control and an in-cab control box. They’re helped by urethane sprayfoam insulation in the bodies-two inches in the rear doors and ceiling, three inches in the side and front walls, and four inches under the floor.

All five T300s are powered by Caterpillar’s 7.2-litre 3126 diesel, a fully electronic engine with many of the programmable and diagnostic features of the big-bore Cats. Thinking of prairie winds, Dezegn spec’d the most powerful highway version of the engine, 300 horses at 2200 rpm with a governed speed of 2400. It churns out 860 pound feet of torque at 1440 rpm. With the direct-drive nine-speed gearbox and 3.58 rear-axle ratio, it’s good for about 110 km/h, though it’s programmed for a road-speed limit in cruise control of 100 km/h.

Though he’s happy with the power and performance, Dezegn is so far reserving judgment on the fuel-economy side of the spec. It may well be spectacular, he says, but he hasn’t yet developed numbers to prove it one way or the other.

He’s new to Cat and to Kenworth, having spent the last 18 years with Internationals. Dezegn is also new to full-maintenance leases, but the PacLease package came with a compelling price. He chooses not to go into the details, but he will say that he’s passed the complete maintenance chore onto someone else for quite a bit less than $100 a month per truck. He couldn’t refuse. K&G had previously done all maintenance itself in its own shop, and Dezegn says the key to getting good performance out of midrange trucks with high duty cycles is the quality of that maintenance.

“As long as the trucks are maintained properly, the high mileage doesn’t seem to matter,” he says. The International Dezegn sold with 500,000 km on the clock is still going strong in its new owner’s hands a year later. And he still has one Binder in the fleet, a 1986 S-Series with a 9-litre International engine, that’s done 900,000 km and is still running fine in local work. It had an engine rebuild very early on but basically hasn’t been touched in years aside from normal preventive maintenance.

It’s too early, of course, to know if the T300 fleet will deliver the kind of durability Dezegn wants, but he says, “They seem to be pretty good.”

Drivers don’t show that kind of reserve. “The drivers love them,” Dezegn says. “They like the handling on the highway, they like the ride.”

So far, everybody’s got a reason to be happy.

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BASIC SPEC: K&G’s T3’s

o Kenworth T300 4×2 conventional o Maximum GCW, 35,000 lb o Custom-fitted refurbished 42-in. sleeper o 26-foot Intercontinental aluminum van body o Thermo King KDII 30SR refrigeration unit o 305-in. wheelbase o Caterpillar 3126 engine, 300 hp at 2200 rpm, 860 lb ft at 1440 rpm o Eaton Fuller RT8709B 9-speed transmission o Eaton 12,000-lb front axle o Eaton 23,000-lb single rear axle o Hendrickson HAS230L rear air suspension o Eaton ES 16.5×5 front brakes o Eaton ES 16.5×7 rear brakes o Bendix AD-9 air dryer o Michelin XZA2 11R22.5 front tires o Michelin XDHT 11R22.5 rear tires o Miscellany: Accuride hub-piloted wheels, extended driveline for non-standard wheelbase