BF/GF team heading to millington, TN 2/2/15

Hey guys! Sorry for the hiatus, we got sidetracked for a little while!

So, let's do a rather large update, we ran as company drivers for a few months and multiple things happened....

Firstly, inside facing cameras are happening, as I'm sure everyone know by now. We WERE NOT ok with this, which began us looking at alternative options. We live in the truck six to eight weeks at a time, it is our home for all intents and purposes. We were not o.k. with Swift's new open ended terms of use regarding these cameras. I won't delve too deep into that...

Secondly, we had finally gotten upgraded to a team truck, a 2014 t680 with under 200k on it, we loved the truck.... we called her "Big Blue". we were in Blue about a month and she started using oil worse and worse, I was literally keeping 5 gallons of oil on the truck because she was using about a qt. Every 500 miles....so ALOT. She was "using it" not leaking it. The motor was spotless and I would have seen a leak.

Anyway, after a month of putting a gallon of oil in her every 2500 miles, I decided she needed to be fixed properly, and that we couldn't afford to be down as long as it was gonna take for them to diagnose, and likely for kenworth to have to tear the motor apart for what I believe was one or more rings not seating properly.

We ended up in the memphis terminal when we made our decision, we turned Big Blue in so she could get the care she needed, and went and talked to a recruiter about leasing a truck.

A little back story on this is, I have a guy who came through academy with me who was a roommate, that I consider a friend, who had gone L/O before us. He was doing well and I had kept in touch with my mentor who was a L/O when I went through my mentor time. Both had told me, and I had done the research to back up that there is good money to be made for teams in L/O.

I also concluded that we would be better off to lease a truck because of the miles we run, at ~200k miles a year, if I paid on a truck for 4-5 years that was anything but a glider...it would be ready for a rebuild or worse. I've seen countless examples of this with these new trucks.

So, we ended up leasing a 2015 pete, slightly used. With 3 yrs left on the lease. I believe it had just over 70,000 miles on it. 13 speed, fridge, 80" sleeper.
Met everything we wanted, I love this truck.

So far we've been doing as well as you can expect, we spent a couple days in the shop here and there getting a few things fixed on the truck that weren't right. Covered under IEL's 30 day warranty. Averaged a little over 4500 miles per week, and did 5500 last week.

Freight hasn't exactly been booming in july, but we've been doing well and saving money.

Fast forward to today, we've been down since Thursday with an adaptive cruise fault. We ran for a week and a half with no cruise and finally brought it in to get looked at while we were taking a 34.

Initially the swift laredo shop told us that we needed to take it to peterbilt, as they didn't have anyone to work on the electronics. So we spent 3 days at peterbilt only to find out they didn't have the software to diagnose the problem....surprise surprise, turns out it's a problem with the Onguard system, which is a system swift has put on the truck...so swift has to fix it.

So now we're back at swift laredo where we started and the truck is in the shop....and we're waiting to hear back on what the problem is.

How's everyone else doing?!?

 

Hello akula,

We're doing well. Sorry for the hiatus, we've had alot of changes happen in the past couple months and got sidetracked from this thread. We've seen every state but north Dakota and the New England states north of PA. (No rush there)

We recently spent an obscene amount of time in montana, and for awhile didn't think we were gonna get out of the PNW. Haha.

 

Cool man, glad to hear you made it through training and mentor time.

How was academy? Have any major issues?