New flatbedder looking for tips

Rear the tips and tricks of flatbedding thread in this section.

 

Youtube

 

Fill up with fuel and weigh your wagon empty. You will want to know your empty weight. Stick and brock hauling mean's you're almost always going to be grossing near max.

Get the big Vee boards for brick.

Protect your straps on brick and steel.

 

Go through the flatbed photos and the flatbed hall of shame threads. You can learn a ton just from those.

 

1) Help the next guy roll his tarps, pay it forward.

2) Get out of the truck before loading and make sure the loader allows you to belly strap any load that is over two tiers high esp on lumber and stuff where its hard to do afterwards. Not doing this properly can get you an OOS violation.

3) When checking in with shipping always get the loads weight before they put anything on your truck. Many places without a scale will ask you to scale and come back if you are overloaded wasting alot of time. This is why it is important to know your tare weight.

4) Find a good safe place to pull over when leaving the shipper to do your first load check. Less than < 50 miles or 1 hour. Try and do it sooner. If you run alot of two lanes it may not be any pull offs for miles and miles.

5) Stay safe and drive the load.

 

Experience is the best teacher.Just keep an open mind and be patient.

 

The more time you take, the faster you will get there.

Securing a weird load and wanting to hurry up and leave and looking at it thinking “it should be fine”. No. If you have any doubts, take the time to ensure it is good. Better to spend an extra 10 minutes at shipper, then 30+ down the road trying to fix a shift or something

Especially tarps.