That seems like a heck of a deal! Especially if you had a use for a small fire protection vehicle.
I assume with 4WD and that small of a chassis that the truck is what we would call a "brush rig" rather than a pumper. I would expect it to carry about 200-300 gallons of water and probably it has 2 or 3 reels of rubber coated hose and plumbing to connect regular 1.5" fabric covered fire hose. Some brush rigs use the truck engine to operate the fire pump and some have secondary engines that run the pump independantly. Often the units with secondary engines are built to be transferred to new chassis.
A brush rig may have very low mileage, but the mileage it has may have been really tough miles, and might not include a bunch of time running the pump while the truck is stationary. When I was a fireman, we took our brush rigs into all sorts of places, including places people thought we could not get to. We had to use the front winch a number of times to get back out or to safety.
During my fire service, our department put new chassis under our brush rigs, which had been 1959 Dodge Power Wagons. The one I ran the most also got a new rear unit, as the district sold the complete brush rig to another department. The new Ford chassis that they used were not nearly as strong or solid as the old Dodges, and I think they replaced them a few years later with IHC chassis that were rated for about twice the weight.
Back then, the bluegrass farmers were allowed to burn off the straw after they had combined it. This got rid of the almost useless straw, killed the weed seeds, and most important, stimulated the bluegrass plants to produce much more seed than they normally would. Almost all the bluegrass farmers had some kind of old brush rig to use when they burned off the fields. They would plow a wide fire line around the perimeter of the fields and light the field around the edge of the fire line so the fire would burn toward the center of the field. It worked really well, and I do not remember any of the fires ever getting away from the farmers. But it did produce some smoke, and a lot of steam. In the end, the econazis made it illegal for the farmers to burn their fields, which resulted in my area losing the economic advantage it had in producing bluegrass seed. Tough times in the farming community. Lots of farmers have gone back to growing wheat, which requires much more tillage and which results in lots more soil erosion, which bluegrass farming had almost eliminated.
It would be interesting to know if the buyer of the 86 GMC plans to use it as a fire truck, or if they plan to do something else with the chassis. It might have a lot of aluminum in the fire fighting unit. I think an aluminum water tank would be great, since steel tanks rusting out was one of the big reason my district needed to update the brush rigs.
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Today's Featured Article - History of the Nuffield Tractor - by Anthony West. The Nuffield tractor story started in early 1945. The British government still reeling from the effects of the war on the economy, approached the Nuffield organization to see if they would design and build an "ALL NEW" British built wheeled tractor, suitable for both British and world farming.
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