Running a one-truck, one-driver family pumping operation, Bryan Mast doesn’t buy a vacuum truck very often. So when he does, he needs the build-out to match his expectations and be ready for work the day he picks up the keys. And when Mast, owner of Brenner’s Sanitary Services with his wife, Kim, contracted with Lincoln Center Mfg. (formerly Marengo Fabricated Steel) for his latest truck, he had an interesting idea to oversee the project.

“My wife let me take off every Friday for eight weeks for a couple hours to look at the truck and go over how I wanted it done. They did everything I wanted, the way I wanted it done,” recalls Mast of his weekly trips to Lincoln Center’s facility about 90 minutes from the family’s home base in Apple Creek, Ohio. 

On his weekly trips, Mast collaborated with the guys at the factory on every detail of the truck, a refurbished, repurposed 1996 Kenworth semi rig. On one of the later trips, he told the guys at Lincoln Center that his plan was to get his truck into the Pumper Classy Truck of the Month feature. The crew responded with some surprises.

“Once I told them that with two or three weeks to go, they did a bunch of custom stainless steel pieces and that didn’t cost me extra,” Mast explains. Included in the shiny bits was a one-off custom rear bumper, custom mud flaps and backlit personalized stainless steel cutout decorative pieces. 

AND THE WINNER IS …

Mast’s careful specs for the septage hauler and the extras from Lincoln Center played an important role in the truck making not only the October Classy Truck page, but winning Pumper’s annual Classy Truck of the Year award for 2020. A phone call to announce the award practically left Mast speechless.

“That’s a heck of a Christmas present, I’ll tell you that. That’s crazy; I’m ecstatic,” Mast says when he receives the call. I telephoned him a few days later and the news was starting to sink in.

“I still can’t believe it actually happened. After I talked to you, I told my wife that I almost started crying. Two and a half years ago I wouldn’t have guessed that it would actually happen. That’s amazing. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would come true,” Mast says. 

Well, it did come true. Evidence is the photo of the Brenner’s truck on the cover of this issue. 

The black and lime green Kenworth combines an old-school pumper truck flair with striking graphics and lots of chrome accents. It borrows the best of your father’s work truck presented in a modern, reliable package built for today’s owner-operator. The timeless design of the Kenworth rig is double-framed for strength to carry a 3,600-gallon multiload steel tank and a higher-powered pump to get the job done faster so he can keep ’er movin’.

The W900L model is outfitted with 500 hp engine for ample power and hooked up to a 13-speed Eaton Fuller transmission. The truck employs a National Vacuum Equipment 866 Max Pak pump.

FINDING THE RIGHT RIG

Lincoln Center gave Mast the wheelbase parameters for his truck search, and his wife discovered the refreshed and reconfigured Kenworth in an unlikely place: on Facebook Marketplace. “It happened that this truck was 15 minutes from our house and we didn’t even know it,” Mast recalls. The previous owner “put $20,000 to $30,000 into it and we paid $35,000 for the truck. I couldn’t pass it up.”

Mast, 42, likes the classic look of the older trucks and still prefers to avoid modern emissions, but might have expected to find tired examples when he started searching. Instead, the Kenworth was owned by a farmer using it to haul grain, and it had been fully sorted before the purchase. The engine was rebuilt, the clutch was new, brakes, tires and exhaust were replaced, and the farmer had swapped the over-the-road bunk for a handy 10-inch day cab extension. 

The truck was inspected for two hours by Mast and an experienced mechanic, and the only issues they found were the single-frame and some suspension bushings that needed replacement before the tank was added. “The hood is fiberglass, the cab is aluminum and the cab extension is fiberglass, so it’s not going to rust,” Mast says. 

Mast went to work on the interior to make it pumper-friendly. He added a kicker-style subwoofer behind the passenger seat, tied into the stereo that has ceiling-mounted mid- and high-range speakers. It makes a great system for him to blast country and ’80s and ’90s rock tunes while running routes. He built a shelving system behind the seat for gloves and other daily supplies, and he put a tote between the dual air-ride seats to carry paperwork for the treatment plant and billing books.

“It’s pretty fancy, a lot fancier than what I’m used to,” Mast jokes.

A SMART BUILD

Mast went into the build with the idea of getting the truck published in the magazine, but more important, he wanted a truck that’s easier to use, focused on the pumper who hauls hoses and works dawn to dusk in the summer. The tank is upsized just enough from his last truck to cut down on trips to the dumpsite. The pump is strong enough to make long pulls quicker. The cab is comfortable and quiet, and all the components outside are in the right place for Mast. And all the updates will limit annoying breakdowns that can come with running a well-used truck.

One unexpected user-friendly advantage to the new truck is that Lincoln Center installed the tank with a 4-inch rearward slope to help with unloading. And when Mast drops the bags on the air-suspension, the slope goes to 6 inches. He had previously looked at adding a hoist and a jetter to the rig but didn’t want to spend the extra $12,000. For ease of working, he thinks he will make that investment on his next truck.

Still in all, the truck is a major upgrade and a good looker going down the road.

“It’s actually fun to go to work now,” he says. “I wanted it easier, more efficient and I guess that’s about it.”

As for the looks, Mast has received hundreds of customer compliments

 for the appearance of his new truck and how clean he keeps it with twice-a-week baths and frequent pampering and polishing. The feedback is important to Mast.

“I learned from dad that if you want to do a job, do it right. And I don’t want to drive around in something that looks like a piece of junk,” Mast says. “One customer said to me, ‘Even when your truck is dirty it still looks nice.’ The biggest thing when we had this built was, we wanted it to look nice and to look professional.”

THREE GENERATIONS

Brenner’s Sanitary Services was founded in 1975 by Mast’s grandfather, Bill. Bill’s son-in-law Bob Mast took over in 1985. He passed away in 2013 and the company came to Bryan in 2014. Like many family operations, Kim runs the office and Bryan is on the truck, averaging about six daily pumpouts in the summer and three to four in the winter, covering a 50-mile radius including Wayne, Holmes and Ashland counties. The work is mainly residential septic, grease traps and lift stations. In addition to pumping, Mast conducts real estate inspections, water samples, well flows and repair work. 

The family is rounded out by Mast’s children, Kelsey, 22, and Kamron, 11. Kamron likes to ride along on the truck, but Mast doesn’t know if he has a future pumper on his hands yet.

If you want to catch a glimpse of Mast’s Kenworth driving through the rolling hills of north-central Ohio, you might have an easier time looking for him in the evenings. He admits he went kind of crazy adding about $2,500 in LED accent lighting on the rig, from about 50 marker lights all the way around to green glow lights under the truck. The lights were one reason he was excited to participate in the nighttime Transport for Christ truck parade, joining a convoy of 300 rigs in nearby Mount Hope, Ohio. 

“There are lights all over this thing. It lights up like a Christmas tree at night,” he says.