Doc; Top of the morning to you sir, I hope this finds you all doing well.
As I was reading your post about "no difference between -20° and -40° I had to wince a tiny bit as the memory banks began to tumble open again.
We used to get some stupid cold snaps in late January or early February that'd make life tough for daily chores for sure.
One year we had three railway producer grain cars to fill - they just pull the cars off on a track siding and you self fill. The siding was in a little town about 20 minutes away in summer, so we had a half hour road time either way with our semis and maybe a half hour fill/empty time at home and the siding. Filling the three cars was something like 4 days work if memory serves.
Anyway it got "up" to about -40° but was as cold as -44° as I recall. We just kept the auger tractors running once we got them running each morning, the same with the trucks of course. The stupid thing was that in those pre-synthetic oil days the transmission would get so stiff I could hardly shift it by the end of the trip.
We'd wrap the front of the truck with a tarp when we were filling and cover the back of the cab over International I was running as well to keep some heat in - so the transmission started the trip a bit warmer anyways.
I had this really good Arctic Cat brand face mask on that time, but it was cold enough in the wind I got frost bite on both eyebrows that week.
Steel breaking - like both front shocks on my cousin's pickup snapping like pretzels when he hit a snow drift. Snowmobile shafts snapping in similar manner.
Jumped into the cab of my brother's brand new 1977 F250 and spider webbed the entire seat. Remember those vinyl sort of seats in pickups back then?
Yah Doc, I can honestly say I don't miss the extreme cold much at all.......
