Peterbilt

Peterbilt Motors Company, founded in 1939 in Oakland, California, is an American manufacturer of medium- and heavy-duty Class 5 through Class 8 trucks. It operates manufacturing facilities and has its headquarters in Denton, Texas. It also has a factory in Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec.

Facilities

From 1939 until the mid-1980s, the company was based in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. The original plant was in Oakland, which closed and in 1960, to move to Newark, California, also in the East Bay. Its headquarters and a new state-of-the-art manufacturing plant opened in Newark in October 1960. Truck production there ended at the close of 1986. Division headquarters and engineering remained in Newark until 1992, when a new administrative complex and a new engineering department at the Denton plant were completed. The new Madison/Nashville plant opened in 1969 in Madison, Tennessee, for the east-coast market. Originally it only manufactured the 352/282 cabover, then conventional production began in the 1970s, until it was closed in 2009. Production of class 8 trucks continues at the Denton, Texas plant.

.475 Wildey Magnum

The .475 Wildey Magnum is a semi-automatic pistol cartridge designed for big game hunting in the Wildey pistol.

History

The .475 Wildey Magnum was designed to be a hunting round. Cases are formed from .284 Winchester brass with the neck opened to take a .475" bullet, and the length is the same as the .45 Winchester Magnum. Velocity at 100 yards is equivalent to the muzzle velocity of the .44 Magnum.

Popular media

While not being very common, the .475 Wildey Magnum is most famous for its appearance in Death Wish 3, where the Wildey (chambered for this cartridge) was a signature weapon of Paul Kersey, a character portrayed by Charles Bronson in the Death Wish film series.

Additional Wildey calibers

In the late 1980's, Wildey, Inc. produced three additional calibers using necked down versions of the .475 Wildey Magnum brass casing originally designed in 1983 in order to achieve higher velocities and muzzle energies. First was the .357 Wildey Magnum (also known as the .357 Peterbuilt) which used a .357 Magnum bullet. Second was the .41 Wildey Magnum (also known as the 10 mm Wildey Magnum) which used a .41 Magnum bullet. Last was the .44 Wildey Magnum (also known as the 11 mm Wildey Magnum) which used a .44 Magnum bullet. All calibers were eventually discontinued.

Peterbilt 379

The 379 was Peterbilt's flagship truck from 1987 until the 2007 model year maintaining the nameplate's signature long-nose styling coupled with a rugged edged yet refined profile. Available in standard (119″ BBC) and long hood (127″ BBC) lengths.

Variations

Replacing the "359" in 1987, it remained in production until March 2007 with the last 1,000 379s called the "Legacy Class 379".

Common powerplants

Throughout production, the 379 came loaded with some of the most powerful high-torque inline 6-cylinder turbo-diesel engines offered in on-highway vehicles. These engines included the Caterpillar C-11, C-12, C-13, C-15, C-16 and the 3406-(B,C,E,P and EWS), Cummins the "big cam" NTC, N-14, ISM, ISX, Signature 600, and Detroit Diesel 60 series and 90 series.

In popular media

Autobot leader Optimus Prime's alternate mode for the first three installments of the live-action Transformers (film series) is a Peterbilt Model-379 truck. Three modified 379s were used interchangeably. There was much controversy over this in the Transformers fan community because Optimus Prime is almost always portrayed in the various cartoon series as a flat-nose cab over semi-trailer truck (or later as a fire engine); his movie incarnation would be the second with an extended nose conventional cab. The filmmakers have said that, ignoring the fan-termed "mass shifting" associated with the series, Optimus's final official height of 28 feet (8.5 m) in robot mode would not have been possible to allow for all of the mechanics of the CGI model if they had gone with a cab-over, which would have dropped him instead to a smaller 20 feet (6.1 m).