My Experiance with Watkins Shepard!

I agree 100%, I'll send every minute I can practicing, you can never have to much practice.

And NO there not that good that they don't need practice we should all be practicing. They all know that we all need to prove ourselves and show that we can Do the Job, Do it safely, and are confident in our ability to do it. And we only have 8 days of class to show them all that.


American Trucker

 

We started off backing on the yard backing, Vern taught us his backing technique (The 2 turtles and the rabbit haha) Then we did a loading/Weight and balance class. Tim was showing us a slide show and one of the pictures was a load of paper that had shifted, and he was telling us about the driver and how he had it fixed. WELL later tonight at like 9pm when we were practicing backing this guy pulls in parks and comes over to talk to us and starts telling us this story about this paper load that shifted on him turns out this is the same guy haha. And he was all excited to show us his load he comes walking over and is like hey guys I got something I wanna show you turns out it was a paper load 6 HUGE (7800lbs) rolls of paper.

Then after class we went back over to the terminal for 4 hours of backing a shifting. We had a 4th guy join us for some practice.


Turns out that was Chris we saw yesterday, He was no more then 15 feet from us haha I'm kinda mad at myself for not going over to say hi.....but now that I know his truck number and what he looks like in person I will next time.

4 Down 6 to go! I think we're gonna do our mountain driving tomorrow!



American Trucker

 

Yes Sir I will

Well your tandems on the trailer is a turtle, and your drives are a turtle, then Your steering axle is a rabbit. First you put your turtle in the hole, then the rabbit puts the other turtle (Drives) into the hole, then the rabbit catches up and straightens up.

In plainEnglishh what I think he's saying is your tandems and your drives move slow, and you steering axle moves much faster so don't worry about the front start from the back and work your way in......I could be misunderstanding him but thats what I got from it. He's much better at explaining it haha.


American Trucker

 

So today we did our mountain driving, on Black Mountain (6 Miles of 6% Grade) in North Carolina. After hearing every school saying NEVER take it out of gear and even the DMV book says it, and the argument on here with W/S drivers and other drivers about shifting on a grade, I thought it was going to be really hard to do it........

Then they tell you your going to go Up the mountain then Down the mountain at 79,***lbs (just under Max gross) So I was a little nervous about screwing it up, Well it was EASY! It was very easy and smooth, they had us going up down up down up down over and over all the way up and all the way down. It was really fun. I was playing with the Jake lol I had it in seventh gear with the Jake on holding me at 1500 RPM at 25mph down the grade, and I shut the jake off then turned it back on, then I put it on low got some speed going then put it on high and it slowed it right back down lol They would throw scenarios at us like "Theres an accident right there in front of you, what do you do?" So you just brake hard down to 1000 RPM and then pull it out of gear raise the RPMs to 1600 RPM and then double down (Put it in a gear 2 lower then the one you pulled it out of "like from 8th down to 6th).

So now all we have left is classroom stuff/video's and a little more backing stuff and we're done, I think......


We had a little study group today after class for like 2 hours, We did the first two Log Scenarios and went over all the test in the book, 99% of us had 99% of the answers right, we'd go threw them and on the 4 or 5 questions that we didn't all have the same answer for we'd all look for the answer together and Make SURE it was right......


This week really flew by, we just got back from the Sea Food Place across the street, It was Really good (Steak). Tomorrow we're going over to practice backing and shifting, all day and there's a Race at the Hickory raceway we're going to go over and check out. And fingers crossed we'll be done and hitting the road on Wednesday or Thursday.





American Trucker