Road test coming up

Slow and Easy wins the race, don’t work the steering wheel, picture how the truck would look driving out of that spot, it’ll back in the same way.

 

Did they teach you the formula for parallel parking?

Are you good at gliding in the trailer on the offset?

What type of tractor and trailer are you using?

The alley dock is easy if you don't end up overthinking it. Are you paying attention to the path your trailer tires are taking?

With a sleeper and a 53 foot trailer the parallel should just be a hard turn until your trailer is pointing near the targets, hard turn to straighten up then straight until the back of your sleeper is even with the box and then a hard turn until your mudflaps are in the middle of the box and a hard turn the other way to get your steers into the box.

If you get your drives far enough into the box and use pullups to get alignment with a target cone you should be good.

For ally dock being in the middle of the lane is important as people being too close to the wall seems to be when they fail.

If you get no points on the straight and offset you can actually back up a few feet and say you are done and still pass BTW. But IMHO you will be cheeting yourself to not learn how to back.

Not being in the final position is 10 points and you are allowed 12.

 

I should add that if you aren't good at judging trailer angle in your convex mirrors the first two turns on the parallel can be done with looking for alignment between your tractor and landing gear.

Pay attention to the location of that in your mirrors and it will work for both conventional and driver side. With a typical dropnose sleeper truck and a 53 foot trailer it will be close to where the far side angle iron meets the crossbar creating a point of a triangle.

Also remember to not be rolling when turning the steering wheel. You will just waste distance going the wrong way.

While on the topic of the steering wheel.

1: remember that for most trucks, 2 full turns from lock will be straight

2: remember to keep pressure against the steering wheel lock as you start to move and you should get about an additional 1/4 turn out of it.

 

Hell I got 1 day of straight line, off set, and parallel before testing... you’ll be fine. Look at all these crazy fools driving truck, you can do it too.

 

Pretend English is your second language. Seems to work for some of the guys that live-load where I work.
For the first time, I had to back a truck onto a door for a couple of guys from India. They were nice guys, but neither one could do it, and it isn't a hard door to back to. Especially since the doors on either side were unoccupied.
How in the h e double hockey sticks do they have CDLs?