RED River Army Depot

Has anyone checked into if the red river army depot will work on trucks that civilians bought. Like doing front end work or complete paint jobs with camo patters. or electrical wiring. Just wondering if they just did military contract work.

With as much equipment they have there and as busy as they are I would not think they would do a civilian truck for any reason .. There is to much urgency for equipment overseas .
Although that it is a Good idea . !! It would be nice for a place to work on civilian trucks ??

A couple of years ago I picked up a M35a2c truck there. Got it very low cost.

Driving to the truck from the only entrance you can enter to pick up led me through storage fields with at least 1500 Hummers being up armored. There were more MRAP vehicles being up graded than that.

That place is busy!!!!!!!!!!!!

With what they get to re-do a truck for the Gov. I doubt you would want to pay them to rebuild something on yours.

February 12th, 2012.

diverman555:

I work for Uncle Sam, he is NOT in the business of rebuilding equipment for civillians for any reason, unless you happen to be a government leader they want to humor..... Look at the value sticker on the door of any decommissioned M35A2 for what Uncle considered it worth when he decommissioned it...! He doesn't depreciate the equipment, no matter how old, and unless you're Bill Gates, you probably couldn't afford the cost. The one exception to rule no. 1 above, IS when he rebuilds a truck, then suddenly decides to decommission it. I have seen a couple of M35A3's with, oh 37 miles since rebuild go up on GL, and those do seem to be the exception....
This is a hobby where you are going to learn really quick to do your own repairs, rebuilds, repaints, or you are gonna shell out a lot of money to those who do the work for $$$. The good news is that there are a lot of folks on here who do know how to do all that work, and they are often ready to help. Every now and then you'll run into an old deuce mechanic who likes to work on deuces, and he will cut you some slack on repairs and such... one such mechanic is Mr. Curtis Weemes at Weemes Diesel in Clarksville, Texas, a better deuce mechanic you will not find, but he is so busy with civillian trucks that the deuces catch it when he can get to them... a rare gem indeed!

RRAD is an awesome facility, I lived there for about 3 weeks 2 summers ago as I attended MRAP University there. As for taking on Civilian work or helping out on a Civilian owned truck, I could only wish you the best of luck. I'm sure there is some great talent there, but I can assure the work would have to be done "off base". They are very busy rebuilding M939's, SEE Tractors, FMTV's, and HMMWV's. The first two, I couldn't figure out why they are spending time on that but perhaps they have a Foreign Military Sales deal going on. From what I saw while I was there, they were only doing A1's and A2's of the M939 series. I saw alot of nice take out NHC 250's and 8.3 6CTA's and I also saw alot of freshly rebuilt motors and such coming right back into freshly redone chassis. They also test drive the final product on the back roads of the base. Where they go from there, I couldn't tell ya cause, I had to go through a debriefing along with my family at the Pass and ID office before we could even go to our accommodations for those 3 weeks. And we're talking, we had valid cards, they just happened to not be registered in RRAD's database. I had to show copies of my orders and all that mess before we were allowed on the installation!!!! As a side note, RRAD is one of the first installations to require registering you're government CAC Card so that it matches up to the scanners that they use at the front gate. And Yes, they use it.

The quality of the work that I have seen coming of Red River is fair to poor at best. I would be happy to back that up if anyone takes issue with it.

I believe our men deserve the best we can give them and I assert that they are not always getting it.

I contacted Red River Army Depot about their "rebuild" program with the M939 series trucks. They apparently DO NOT rebuild the trucks there. They have a list of replacable that they concentrate on like coolant hoses, belts, etc. They apparently do repaint the engines flat black but do not replace the engine unless there is something really wrong with it. So when you see a RRAD dataplate on the dash, it does NOT mean your truck went through a depot rebuild. They sent me an unclassified manifest of what they actually do. From the looks of it, it is mostly MWO's. Makes me wonder why they don't take care of these MWO's while at the unit or division level. Among the high priority items are: hardtops, 3 color CARC, replacing batteries (presently Hawkers are the prescribed batteries)

This probably explains why I got a rebuilt M939A2 that had a valve knock! I could not understand why the motor LOOKED NEW...had new paint...but had an old date on it (at the time, I assume it was a crate motor that sat on a shelf). Now, I know, if they don't replace or rebuild the motor (with a data plate)...they probably just paint it. I do have a RRAD rebuilt M934 with a rebuilt motor with data plate. Runs like a raped ape.

My M818 with 202 miles is a RRAD rebuild. looks great, bad transfer, leaky wheel seals.

63foxtrot said:

My M818 with 202 miles is a RRAD rebuild. looks great, bad transfer, leaky wheel seals.

Click to expand...

It was explained to me by the director of the RRAD 5ton program that the level of rebuild a 5ton got depended on which of two programs the truck belonged to when it went thru RRAD. One being the active duty track and the other was Guard/Reserve I think...The active track got a whole level higher rebuild than the other track to include new wheels, new or rebuilt engine & transfer case etc...The other track was more of a high level inspection & replace only things way out of spec. One easy way to check is look at your transfer case...if it has a rebuilt by RRAD data plate on it then your truck went thru the active duty rebuild and got the best that RRAD had to offer...I've been finding bits of masking tape under the CARC paint on my truck that usually hides a data plate or such...one of which was the rebuild plate on the transfer case that matched what he told me about my serial #.

He also said the IUID digital block on the bottom right corner of the RRAD dataplate should give truck specific info if anyone can read it with a scanner...

bottom right of pic is IUID digital data block...Can anyone out there read this?