This month’s cool creation was built for Glenn Bohmann of Bohmann Excavating in Lawrence, Kansas. Glenn (60) has been hauling rock and pushing dirt for all of his life, and now that he has a shiny new bright red Peterbilt dump truck, he will be “rockin’ on” well into the future.
While growing up, Glenn’s dad owned an excavation company, and by the age of 16 he was already running machines and helping maintain their equipment. After high school, Glenn hit the road with his father, going town to town in Texas, preparing sites for new McDonald’s restaurants. After a while, Glenn decided he was done 
with that and headed home, where he got a job working for a local excavating outfit, where he stayed for the next 15 years.
In 1990, he decided to start his own operation, partnering up with his brother and another acquaintance, but for some reason they just never clicked. In 2000, Glenn went to Hawaii to marry his beloved wife, Kim, and when they got back from the honeymoon they found out that Glenn had been forced out of his own company by his brother and other partner. Looking to keep going, they started another new company called Bohmann Excavating, which is still going strong today.
It took Glenn four marriages to finally find the right girl, but the fourth one was a charm. Kim was awesome, and the love of his life. In 2009, she came down with a rare disease called Scleroderma, which causes a premature hardening of the skin and joints. This disease not only has very few treatment options, but it has no cure. After a tiring fight that lasted about three years, Kim passed away in October of 2012.
Wanting Glenn to keep going despite life’s challenges, Kim made sure to train one of her friends so that she could take over the paperwork for Glenn’s company after she was gone. The fact that “she is now in a better place and she no longer has to suffer” does bring Glenn some peace, though.
Over the years, Glenn has had a few different trucks, including a red 2006 Pete 379 day cab he ordered from Clint, which he used to pull an end dump trailer. He recently decided to get rid of the tractor-trailer setup and replace it with a dump truck, instead.
Peterbilt had just introduced a model 567 in a set-forward axle configuration, and both Glenn and Clint thought it would make a great dump truck. The 2016 truck was ordered with a heavy single frame, a 20K-lb. front axle, 44K-lb. full locking rear axles on Air-Trac suspension, (3) 8K-lb. drop axles, a PACCAR MX 500 engine, an Allison automatic transmission and dual exhaust (even though one of them is just for looks). The bright red dump truck also has all aluminum wheels, a 100-gallon polished fuel tank, and bright finished mirrors and visor.
After the truck arrived, it was sent to Heritage in Carlinville, Illinois where they installed a 19-foot dump bed with no dog house, a freight door and a standard gate. When it was all said and done, Glenn wound up with a legal load capacity of 22.5 tons, which is pretty close to what he was getting with his tractor-trailer combination. This truck is the third dump truck in his fleet.
Glenn has two grown children from a previous marriage – Blake and Brett – and Kim had two, as well – Ryan and Morgan. When Glenn and Kim got married, they both started over together and had a son named Cameron (14). Glenn is now raising him on his own, and he is infatuated with learning how to pilot an airplane in a simulator. So much so, in fact, that Glenn is considering buying and installing an actual simulator in their house for him to practice on.
Life is not always easy, but if you keep a positive attitude and just keep “rockin’ on” you will eventually be rewarded with some good stuff. And, driving a nice new truck and raising his son, is definitely good stuff for Glenn Bohmann – very good!