CDL Skills

Ok, i am at the end of the course, the pretrial is good, air brakes test is good, driving is good. Skills are killing me. I have watched the you tube videos, kept reminding myself of which way I should be turning when doing parallel parking, and off tracking.

Still having issues with them. Today I did manage to do 6 straight-line backs in a row well. The morning started out really rough. But after lunch I got my head out of my rear and just kept reminding me that I can do this. And I did get it.

Tomorrow will be parallel parking and off tracking. Now, I know I have done it in the past, but not consistently well enough. Any hints?

 

Just stay calm and confident. You can do it.

 

You have to keep practicing.YouTube videos won't help.Ask your school if you can have an instructor to help you one on one.

 

Practice makes perfect as they say. I went through the skills test a few months back to upgrade from a Class B to a Class A. I am not a test taker at all, hate them with a passion. While your school likes to see your maneuvers as non-stop, I just took it slow, stopped when I needed to to think about it. There is no penalty for stopping and thinking before you steer. Straight backing, just make small corrections and correct it as soon as possible. Ask for help, they should give it to you, that is what you are paying for.

 

I am going to do that tomorrow. I am not just looking at videos ; during the day at school I am practicing and going over the correct turns etc. We do skills twice a week and drive twice a week and then on the friday we do one of each.

 

Thank you. This is what I did this afternoon and that worked. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day. Today was the day from you know where.

 

When you do skills twice a week is that an all day thing?

 

Our day starts at 8am. We usually do the pre trip, incab check and air brake test. Then we go ahead to the skills. So by the time we are ready to practice the skills it is about 8;45 depending on how many want to do the air brake test. Then we have lunch at 10;30 until 11;15. Then its back to skills until 2pm. There are usually 2-3 trucks moving on the pad and maybe 2-3 people waiting for their try. Today there was two trucks moving, and 6 people waiting. So basically we get about 6 tries in the day to practice the skills ; sometimes there are two instructors, today there was just one because the other three were out. Two were driving with 4 guys each, and one was at the test site with another guy.

 

Thanks for that detailed summary lol.Actually reason for the question was do they give all you students a lot of time when doing the skills test.

 

I am not sure how long the skills part of the test is. The pretrial etc is about 45 minutes, the driving part is about 45 mins. I am just frustrated at this stage because its the only think stopping me moving forward.