After developing my Peterbilt fire truck, the idea of bringing out a heavy American tow truck as a kit was a project very much to my taste. Looking for a real knockout of a tow truck, we found a picture of this wrecker (or tow truck, as they call it over there) in a 1991 Trucker Magazin calendar. The owner was Stepp's Towing Service in Tampa, Florida.
We agreed it was the idea of the year and had to be realised. At that time Revell already had a Peterbilt 359 tractor unit in its range, and Stepp's 379 Pete was technically not far removed from it. Only small details made the difference. So I contacted the towing company in Tampa and asked whether the management, at that time under Todd Stepp, would agree to us producing their four-axle tow truck as a 1/25 scale kit. Miller-Industries in Ooltewah, TN would not provide Revell with any drawings for developing the model.
Once Todd Stepp was enthusiastic about our plan, I set off for Tampa in April 1991. It was also my first flight to America, and I was extremely excited and delighted. I had everything with me: camera, plenty of film, pencils, paper, tape measure and folding rule. I spent eight days in the USA, and 5 of them were needed to photograph and measure the entire tow truck. I took hundreds of photos and made just as many drawings and sketches. With two days left, I drove to Emergency One in Ocala and also visited Disney World in Orlando. Then it was back to Germany, to the Revell office. At the drawing board I made all the drawings the toolmaker needed to build the moulds. At the same time I also built a first model of the Peterbilt wrecker for the 1992 Nuremberg Toy Fair. It was a hand-made sample, or prototype, showing what the future kit would look like (photo above). In August 1992 the first sprues came out of the machine and I started testing them, i.e. I built a first model to check that everything fitted.
Of course there were a few corrections to make, since no kit fits 100 percent straight away. In October 1992 the kit, meaning everything to do with the plastic parts, was finished. There are over 400 parts in the huge box. Anyone who has built this model knows what I am talking about. What followed was the production of the decals and the building instructions. By the end of 1996 the Peterbilt wrecker had been produced and sold more than 40,000 times, and it has been reissued every now and then in the years since.
More original photos of the Peterbilt wrecker in the archive
- First row, picture 1: Peterbilt 379 with a body by Miller-Industries of Ooltewah, Tennessee
- First row, picture 2: the body is the Challenger 8808 type
- First row, picture 3: making all the drawings for the tooling, and building the prototype
- First row, picture 4: parts layout, used to determine the number of new parts, chassis and body
- Second row, picture 1: parts layout, crane body
- Second row, picture 2: building the model for the 1992 Toy Fair in Nuremberg
Article in Trucker magazine, issue 12/1993