Straps on winches

How fast are they getting you unloaded? Rarely am I unloaded before I have all my straps rolled up.

what I do if I have a basic load of building materials. I keep all my straps in my drivers side box on the truck.

clip my strap winder on the trailer near the front. Undo all the winches on the drivers side, go around the back of the trailer and start undoing the winches on the passenger side. As I’m going I’m unhooking the hooks from the drivers side, pulling the strap and tossing the hook under the trailer. Once all the straps are out of winches I pull them all off the load so they can start unloading. Then I start rolling them up, starting with the ones on the front, I’ll usually grab two at a time from the back staying out of the way of the forklift.

straps with the excess tucked agains the load or rubrail stay much tighter and get tighter without having to winch on them 5 different times vs rolling all the excess up on the winch. I’ve hauled the same loads using both techniques.

 

I use to run local out of a drywall plant. Our trailers have the straps kept on the winches. TMC's were not. I'd be out of the yard 20 min or more before TMC.

 

I just tried your method @kylefitzy and I was done before the got the second stack of metal off and back in the AC.

what I would normally do is undo all the winches, starts pulling straps and roll up one side first them move to the next.

This time I started on drivers side, the. Did exactly as you mentioned and started on passenger side while pulling and tossing hook under. #### it was faster.

Thanks for y’all giving tips. Definitely a time saver.

 

Awesome, glad I could help!

 

I only see it on local trucks that are doing multiple stops a day and the trailer is often stored safely at a terminal or drop yard. For an OTR driver, I find it to be lazy and risky. Anybody can come up and steal or cut all your straps in one night and then what?

 

Assuming not much has changed since I was there last...TMC not only frowns upon leaving straps winches up on their trailers, they down upon leaving anything on their trailers, to the point they'll call in (and out) guys if they see them with tarps on their trailers. For them it's a safety issue (really it's an appearance issue--but who's counting?). Of course, with as often as they (and most fleets) switch out trailers, it's really not practical to leave straps winches on trailers.

All that said, they do make an exception if a certain shipper requires it. When I was there, the Home Depot DC in Bloomfield CT (outside Hartford), once Western Express took it over, used to outright mandate that guys left 8 straps winched on the trailers along with two lumber tarps prior to dropping them. Right off hand I can't think of any other dedicated shippers that required that, but then that was also like 6 or 7 years ago.

 

Yes that sounds about right because they have like 5 guys strapping and tarping trailers out there. I believe Western Express lost that contract to TMC also, I haven't been back to see how TMC does it.

 

encountered the same in Colorado awhile back.

 

That's usually how it went and apparently still goes.

I don't know how many of the DCs TMC operates these days vs staffs (then again I didn't know how many there were when I still drove for them, either), but for the most part they're all preloaded, "pre-strapped" and at least have the tarps laid over the load.

All that said...I never trusted any of them any time I picked up a DC load. (Oddly enough, it wasn't the Westen Express guys up in Bloomfield I had the biggest issues with; it was TMC's own guys at the St. Joseph MO Lowe's DC!) I always looked under those tarps to see what was up under there, how they loaded the trailer, what did get strapped over (and hopefully not damaged), and then threw a bunch of my own straps over top of the tarps (since we weren't allowed to pull the tarps completely off) at the most secure points I could find, readjusted the tarps to the degree I was able (in Bloomfield at the time they didn't care about us getting on top of the load; don't know if thats still the case), bungeed them as best I could and hoped for the best going down the road (with appropriate load checks, because very rarely did they ever belly strap anything and having soft insulation and small brittle plastic pipe sitting on solid bunks of lumber and cement board with is just asking for trouble...just one of the many reasons I despised doing DC loads).