Can’t Get Enough: Igor Gedri’s K100E keeps an era alive

Words by Chris Smith. Photography by Jack Duff.

For Igor Gedri, five days a week behind the wheel still was not enough.

The self-confessed truck nut had grown up around furniture transport, spent his youth waiting for pantech trucks to be loaded at a Sumner Park warehouse and had imagined owning a Kenworth for as long as he could remember.

Eventually, he bought the truck he had always pictured: a 1990 Kenworth K100E that allowed him to keep driving even when the working week was over.

“I am just a truck nut,” Gedri told Australian Custom Trucks. His father worked in furniture transport, and the trucks around him during childhood left an impression that never disappeared.

The office never won

Gedri’s parents wanted something different for him. Like many parents who had worked hard in transport, they hoped their son might find a career that was less demanding and more conventional.

He went to university and completed a business degree majoring in information technology. He then did what he was supposed to do and worked in an office.

It did not last.

“I can’t handle being cooped up in an office,” he told ACT. “I had to get out of it and I went back to trucks.”

For Gedri, the better life his parents had wanted for him turned out to be the one he had been drawn to from the beginning. “You have got to do what you love otherwise you are not going to enjoy yourself,” he said.

By the time ACT interviewed him, he had been driving for Toll for about a decade and had spent around five years on B-doubles.

A reminder not to keep putting things off

The K100E purchase was also tied to a more serious change in perspective. Gedri had lost a childhood friend, and the experience made him question how long he should keep postponing the things he wanted to do.

“The risk of not doing something for another five or six years, you start realising that you may not have that time,” he told ACT. When the opportunity to buy the Kenworth appeared, he decided to take it.

He had originally considered buying a cabover owned by a friend and gradually modifying it into the mid-1980s look he loved. Then, at the Castlemaine Truck Show, he came across a K100E that Adtrans had already refurbished.

It had the twin roof-mounted air intakes and the period look he wanted. More importantly, it was already finished.

Gedri had begun pricing paint, chassis work, cab restoration and the many smaller costs involved in building another truck to the same standard. Once he added the time involved, the already-refurbished K100E made increasing sense.

“I started questioning the project,” he said. “It may have taken two or three years until completion. This thing was ready to go, so I just took the plunge.”

Keeping an era of trucking alive

The purchase was not about building a show truck that had lost its connection with the era it represented. Gedri deliberately resisted the temptation to modernise or overdecorate it.

He wanted a truck that looked and felt like the mid-1980s to early-1990s period he remembered. Other drivers agreed. At shows, people regularly told him to leave the truck essentially as it was.

That reaction became part of the enjoyment. Former drivers would approach with stories of K100Es they had once driven. Neighbours and friends would share old photographs. Families wanted to look through the cab.

“One of the reasons I bought it was to keep that era of trucking alive,” Gedri said. “A lot of the shows I take it to, people want to take their kids through the cab, and that’s fantastic.”

For him, the truck was no more difficult to justify than another person’s Harley-Davidson, ski boat or weekend hobby. The only difference was that his leisure time looked a lot like his working week.

“Five days a week in a truck isn’t enough,” he joked, “so I had to buy one.”

That enthusiasm was what made the K100E more than a private collection piece. Every conversation it started helped preserve a little of the period it represented.

ACT archive note: Ages, employment details, family circumstances and other personal details in this feature reflect the original reporting period and should not be treated as current.