Need your experience - Ladders, Tarping, General Safety

Hello all.

I am a Mechanical Engineering Student also interested in entrepreneurship. I'm posting today looking to get input from flatbed drivers as a kind of market research.

A little while back I was chatting with a friend, who's a trucker, about business ideas. He mentioned to me that he would like to see a ladder that attaches to your rub rails for getting on and off of tall loads. As you know, there are a lot of accidents involving falls from the tops of loads. My dad knows some examples and I've read about a few here on the forum already. Seems like a great opportunity, especially to sell to companies, since paying for ladders is certainly cheaper than having guys get hurt. Come to find out, there are definitely things like this already out there but I'm not sure why they don't seem to be standard issue in the industry.

From what I can tell, tarping seems to be one of the worst, if not the worst, part of the job. This would be especially true when the weather gets nasty. It also seems tarping is one of the only reasons you'd need to get on the load. I also realize that not everywhere do you have to get on your load to tarp and sometimes you aren't even allowed to do so, or you have some sort of safety rigging on you. However, certainly, there are some unforeseen problems on the road that require you to get up top to fix.

I talked to my uncle who used to drive about this too and he didn't think there was anything good about the ladder idea. He just said everyone keeps a regular extendable ladder in their truck. If that's true, there are still some disadvantages to these I think, especially on uneven ground.

I assume many people have thought about all of this before, and many innovations have been tried, so I'm a little curious as to why some of these problems still exist.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'd appreciate any kind of relevant input/experience. Hopefully, I made sense.

 

This is great.

I guess "a better moustrap", or ladder in this case, is not the solution. It seems to me more now that the problem is not getting up on top, but tarping itself.

2075 might be a little long of an estimate. If we can send rockets to space and land them again it doesn't seem like there's much that can't be done . I had the thought of using a winch to drag tarps up the back and forward or some long arms that raise up from the back and drape them over the load. Ever thought along those lines?

 

Yes, less is more.