Scale help

Yep second that. A little training and just paying attention goes a long way. If you can see how it's loaded and know the weight a quick look in back should have clued the op in it was going to be nose heavy. If it's a preload Generally if it's that bad you can just look at the bow of the tires on the road and know it's not going to be good.....and just how it feels when you drive off with it. My trainer covered these things with me and I do as well now with my students.

On the aforementioned load I had, I saw it was loaded far to the rear but the shipper scales said 33,800. I knew by how the tires bowed out on the trailer it was probably heavier than the shipper scales said, as well as feeling like I was ### heavy and dragging an anchor behind me lol but without that cat scale ticket couldn't prove it for rework. At least it wasn't that far to go but still far enough I ended up wasting half a day all told. But it had to be done.

 

1. Make sure you got about 100 yards of pavement behind you.
2. Make sure doors are closed.
3. Put it in reverse.
4. Let clutch out and mash on it. Get going as fast as you can.
5. Stomp on break.
6. Wave bye bye and proceed.

 

Certainly an interesting technique!!

 

You forgot step #7.
That's picking up your two detached swing doors off the pavement and throwing them back in, alongside your load.

 

I'm pretty good at this, but you have to know when theirs nothing else possible but reload. That requires scaling a few loads until you get the hang of it.

Now as far as observation goes. It sounds like with your equipment you might have future problems.

In the future keep a close eye on how they load the nose. Try talking to the guy loading it before hand how you'd like to have them load it before they even start.

 

As a rule of thumb (and we all know how accurate those are), if you are loading pallets of roughly equal weight; set your fifth wheel for ride/legal load and tandems for legal length then spread the pallets out to near the back of the rear axle. That will get you close, then you can shift the fifth and/or tandems as needed. When I was hauling produce and they were heavy pallets I would load 2,1,2,1, then 2 the rest of the way, or there might be a single in the middle too. Good shippers know how to load legal.

 

LOL. love it. Wish I knew how to strike through the "closed". Would be funny as all get out to see 2 skids on the ground.

 

Hey gang, this is the stuff that OP needs to learn. Someone pointed out that when they reloaded the trailer, they didn't do anything because the trailer weight was almost exactly the same. That is correct. OP you wasted your time. I would have thought you would have watched or paid attention.

5th wheel sliding only moves weight between the drives and the steers. It does not affect the trailer at all. So, if a trailer is loaded badly, the only real adjustment will be from sliding the trailer tandems OR reloading the trailer.

 

One thing doesn't make sense to me here. If the original steer weight was 12,700 and the final steer weight was 14,180 (after truckstop parking lot maneuvering) and if the fifth wheel is all the way to the rear, how does that happen? How does more weight get on the steer axle when the fifth wheel - if anything - moved rearward, not foward?

 

I was just about to mention that.
She HAD to have moved the fifth wheel forward since the initial weight. The numbers show that.