Low Cat — Brad Walker’s Caterpillar CT630

Brad Walker’s immaculately presented Cat CT630 earns recognition at the Koroit Truck Show.

Words by Chris Smith. Photography by Chris Smith.

If I said no cats were harmed in the making of this story, well that would be a lie. The price of art is sometimes costly but in the end hopefully all worth it. In this case it was well worth it. I still have the antenna from this Caterpillar as a souvenir from when it snapped off coming through a farm gate next to a low hanging tree branch. Luckily for me I took the photos first!

ACT caught up with Brad Walker of D & K Walker Transport based in Kilmore, 60km north of Melbourne, after the very successful Koroit Truck Show where he bagged himself a trophy for his immaculately kept Cat CT630 customised tipper. Australian operators are naturally sceptical and there has been no exception with the Cat brand. However some, like Brad, have taken the punt and gone with the brand and achieved great success.

It has been a cat fight for the brand getting its claws into the Australian market since it launched in 2010, however Cat has extensively expanded with purpose-built models such as the bigger cab CT630LS, the CT630SC specifically engineered for B-double duties and most recently, the roadtrain triples-rated CT630HD.

The group owned by Navistar also plans to re-introduce the popular International truck brand back into Australia.

For Brad, his business is customer orientated and does everything from earthmoving to general freight.

It is attached to a landscaping and garden supplies business as well. He says he has created a niche industry specialising in unique products that are hard to source.

"The secret to business is finding something that no-one else has and supplying it to your customer," he says wisely.

They are based in the northern suburbs of Melbourne but travel all over the state to pick up unique materials.

The service and attention to detail offered is reflected in the CAT CT630 that now stands in front of me.

Brad has taken great care to get the look just right. This included getting a Whitlock bumper on the front end, which makes the Cat look like it sits very low. He says that his request for the bumper was initially denied.

"I wanted the bar done by Whitlock but they said I had to go through Cat, however I explained Cat didn't make the bumper for this particular model. The models that they do have it for, the bumper actually sits much higher," he explains to ACT.

“Whitlock said fair point, went back to the engineers and built the bar.

"That’s why we call it "Low Cat" because it is really low especially when you’re doing road work and making gravel roads, you end up grading the roads for them with the bumper," he jokes.

With the bumper sorted the rest of the customisation took place. Brad did a bit of the work himself but for the majority of the bling he enlisted the services of professionals, Kyzer Kustoms in Shepparton, regional Victoria.

"He wrapped all the tanks, he made the tank straps, and he made the wings for me.”

Because it is a day cab rather than a sleeper the flaring stopped rather than carried on so Kyzer Kustoms helped create a C15 badge that was used to cover an unsightly blank spot.

"I was sitting there bored and I rang him up and said make me a badge with C15 on it, so that was the first one he made like it," he says proudly.

He explains he put the offsets on it and the flares however it was still spraying up so with some more handy work and a few special creations built by Luke they sorted out the issue. Brad made up all the mud flaps.

They added the extra exhaust, and made sure all the stainless was polished.

“We polished all the toolboxes and the hydraulic tanks,” he says.

He explains Luke did an excellent job on the steps.

“Luke made the steps from nothing,” says Brad.

“The standard steps are tight. They used to get one of the steps, cut it in half and stick that down the bottom, you could see all the edges from where they cut it through the middle so Luke made new steps up from scratch,” he says.

They were also forced to do some special work on the tank straps in order for it to look good. Brad says he was initially unsure of how they would turn out.

“He’s done a nice job. We were forced in to doing that because of how the tank strap sat, but then it turned out alright anyway,” he says.

As well as carting for his own garden supply business Walker Landscape Supplies, Brad also carts from different quarries, carts concrete and does a bit of local earth moving jobs.

They initially had three bigger trucks but have down-sized to the one.

They still have a couple of smaller trucks for the local delivery work for the garden supplies side of the business.

Brad is very sentimental and like many of the trucking folk that attend truck shows, he displays his heart on his sleeve when it comes to the industry. It doesn’t seem to happen that much these days but when Brad was a youngster he used to go out with a driver as often as he could and spend time in the cab.

“Barney McFadgen, from Geelong, he’s in the hall of fame in Alice Springs, I used to drive him mad and used to go on every trip with him that I could,” he reminisces.

“When I was 18 I started at WA Freightlines, by 20 I was Operations Manager for seven years,” he says.

He says he was a bit of a lead foot in the car when he was younger and kept losing his license but this meant he could get other jobs in the transport industry because “it kept me in good jobs so I have done everything in transport”.

“I was a loader, I worked for United Transport. I was a yardie for years.

It was probably a good thing because by the time I started driving trucks I was more mature and better for it,” he admits.

With his own business he started buying his own trucks six years ago.

“We had Superliners. I had all Macks and then the last one with the 470 hp trucks, I got sick of it, it was just gutless. So when we went looking for a truck and this time we wanted a Cat motor so we ended up with a Cat truck,” he says.

“We had no choice.”

This truck was bought in Perth. A long way from home.

“Mechanically it was good when it came out of Cat in Perth and it was all serviced and everything like that but chassis wise it had never been washed properly, it was pretty tatty so when we got home we spent a week cleaning it,” Brad says.

The other reason for the unit choice was the tipper body it had.

“It was a Chris’ tipper body, built here in Melbourne. We wanted it because we had a brand new tipper already here the was the same.”

Perception is everything and Brad admits he pissed and moaned when he first got it and thought he had a another dud that just didn’t go.

However they put it on the dyno at the local Cat workshop and it proved this cat had guts.

“I love it, its 507 hp at the back wheels on a dyno at Cat,” he says.

“It hasn’t missed a beat and it’s still under warranty, I couldn’t be happier with the truck,” he says. If Cat ever had a poster boy it would have to be Brad.

“For all the knockers out there I can’t fault it, especially tipper work it’s a good truck, it suits us perfect, except its a bit low, which is my fault,” he says.

“I could have left the standard bumper on it and it would have been right but then it wouldn’t look good!”

He is also proud to take it to the different truck shows to compete with the more established brands.

“Its just like if you don’t turn up in a Kenworth at the truck show now no one notices and I’m like seriously, it’s a pretty good truck,” he says of his CAT CT630.

Considering the work it does coming out of the bush, the different quarries and cement silos it is a testament to his passion for showing it off that he can make it look so spotless.

“If you had seen this truck before the show it had like two inches of dust on it,” he says.

“You can’t keep the dust out, it doesn’t matter what you do,” he says.

It is a tipper so my hat goes off to Brad for cleaning it up so well before the show. The judges were also obviously impressed, since he walked away with a trophy.

Rear Vision: where are they now?

Do you know where this truck is today, or have an update on its story? Tell ACT what happened next. We will verify current updates before adding them to the archive.