What to look for when purchasing a dry van cash from a private party?

What do you mean "a pink slip"?
Purchasing a trailer is the same process as buying your personal car.
Get a Bill of Sale and the Title.
Make sure there is no lien on the title. If there is a lien, the seller should have a " Lien Satisfaction" letter.
Call the lien holder to verify it has been cleared. You might be able to call or check online the DMV and verify status of a title.

Obviously hook the trailer to your truck and make sure everything works properly.

Good Luck

 

I disagree that a 28’ is easier to back up than a 53’. Anyone who’s done it will agree. Even with a single axle day cab. 20’ containers even harder. Get a 53’. Teach practical use skills. Only local LTL use 28’ single pups, usually with a single axle day cab. A skill easily adapted to if needed. 53’ dry Van . Most common, most likely entry level job available. Also get a road Tractor. Nothing fancy, just a small bunk. You can put extra students while teaching basics on private property. I have a 53’ trailer, going to be listing it for sale soon. In Michigan. PM if interested.

 

They do? Hmmm learned something new. I've seen some schools that use a variety of trailers, but never solely a 28 footer. Anyway, to answer your original question, you look at everything that you would if your doing a pretrip. If you were using it to haul freight, then I'd tell you go inside and check for damage and where there might be leaks. Just make sure all the lights and tires is in good working order, all the things your students will need to know to pass a pretrip.

 

Sage in Fort Pierce used 48’ trailers which imo are the perfect size for training schools. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend to anyone a school that uses 28’ trailers..no offense to the OP.
Not everyone going for their CDL A will be pulling a 53’ after school so that’s my reasoning.

 

I’d be looking into trying to get donated equipment. I know Sage Truck driving school ran donated equipment.
Can’t imagine there’s a whole lot of profit running a truck driving school.

 

That does make sense. I think if I started a school, I'd teach the newbies on backing spread axles first. They might go into flatbed and that way they would just get a continuation on backing. I had to unlearn alley docking when I got started.

 

Well I thought about this, I would not want to see a new school crop up, we have too many drivers right now and most of those drivers CAN NOT DRIVE.

GIven them a short trailer to learn on to get an idea how to back up may sound great but really the longer the better, students need real world experience, not cheating to get a cdl.

You all have seen videos about how bad people are backing up, many hit other trucks, buildings or bollards.

So under 30 feet to get the student an idea how to handle the trailer but after a couple hours of that, then 48 or a 53 should be used and a 53 dry van used to make sure the student is ready for the road test.

 

I’m very old school, no cdl school farm trained so I can say that without a doubt as with longer trailers you also learn much much much better set up techniques with manual steering tractors. Lol!

 

Obviously you have no idea what you're talking about.