GP and load securement

If your 10 yr old couch flew out of the back of your truck while going 70 mph down the road.... do you (a) tell the wife the truth, that you didn't tie it down, and now it's a trashed mess.. and honey, we have to buy a new couch... or (b) honey, we stopped at 7-11 for cokes, and two guys stole the couch... and honey, we have to buy a new couch.

 

C. Go buy a new couch without her knowing, and tell her you got it for her as a surprise!

 

That's a lose/lose - first, I spent money without her knowing... and she LIKED the old couch... lose/lose, I tell ya.

 

This is probably the most ridiculous load I ever hauled with a 4 wheeler.



In 2003 I was moving about 35 miles from a house to a farm-house. This trailer is a custom built thing for hauling airplane wings. Under that loose tarp we didn't bother tying down too well, were the wings and tail surfaces for a small plane. Whoever the jack-*** was who built the trailer put the axle too far forward, so I put that little Honda CT70 mini-trail on the front for a little bit of positive tongue weight. I had to shrink the picture to fit within the forum's 600 pixel width limit, but if you can see all those cables hanging down, those used to be the wing wires for an ultralight aircraft that had been crashed, and we used them to tie the other plane's wings onto the trailer.

The table and lawn chairs were not tied in either.

I made this move slow and careful. There were no trailer lights on that thing, so my dad was following me. A few years ago I cut that thing's axle off and re-welded it's brackets further back.

 

yea, that axle does look way too far forward

lol hell you could of cut off the coupler and welded it on the other side of the trailer

 

No, if that was a better pic of the trailer when it's empty, there would have been a lot more welding if I were to flip it. There's tail-light housings on the back, plus the tonge was an A-frame type and was really beefy. To move the axle I just torched off the brackets, made new ones out of heavy flat-stock, and welded them back on further down the chassis. The hardest part was fitting, making sure it was PERFECTLY square so the thing wouldn't dog-walk going down the road.

 

those a frames seem pretty sturdy, but somehow my uncle has managed to bend and mangle the a frame on his little 12 foot utility trailer so bad that its unusable

its like he cant back the truck up without jackknifing it.....and when he does jackknife it he just keeps on backing up....the trailer is such a piece of ****.....its had axle problems, has a new wiring problem every time i talk to him and both of the safety chains are gone.....hes lost that trailer going down the road like 4 times now......thank god my uncle isnt a truck driver

 

My little 8 foot utility trailer was brand new. I just bought it at Harbor Freight and assembled it. Spent lots of time putting a deck on it and making a railing and tailgate, and beefing up the front railing so I can bash into it when I'm loading my ATV. (It's a tilt-bed)

Then I went trucking for a week. I was planning on using that trailer to haul my ATV from my company's yard (where my car was at) to Lincoln, NE where I would be putting the ATV on a friend's trailer for the rest of the trip to Colorado. (The boss let me haul the trailer and the ATV inside the semi-trailer behind a short load of metal parts).

I get home just for a PIT-STOP to load up the trailer and ATV and found the A-frame tongue all bent up. I was FURIOUS! My dad had stolen it and used it to haul a riding lawnmower and he jack-knifed it. I was PISSED. I had no choice but to load it up in the semi-trailer and get moving, I had no time.

The bent-up tongue made the trailer dog-walk all the way from the yard to Lincoln, NE then a week later, all the way home about 550 miles. It was embarrassing. I had my CB in the car and I kept having truck drivers asking if the "4 wheeler hauling the little 4 wheeler" has his ears on. (They saw my CB antenna) Then they'd ask if I knew the trailer was dog-walking.

My dad ended up taking the trailer to his friend's house and they built a new A-frame out of stronger stuff than the original A-frame, so it's all good now. And it doesn't dog-walk.

 

you ever see one of them hitch hogs? they are designed for pulling double utility trailers, basically like a convertor dolly....always been curious about them things, never see them used

 

I don't know how many states that would be legal in.

It's funny you mention "converter" dollies. I don't think UPS has any "converter" dollies, unless the word "converter" is used because it converts a trailer into a wagon.

At Roadway our dollies were all "Jifflox" dollies. We'd call it a "jiff". The dollies were made to double as a tag axle. Most of our single-drive axle tractor frames had an open tail, and a pintle hook in the frame, just ahead of the axle.

The idea was you could pull a set of doubles to the rail yard with a 2-axle tractor, and come back with a 48 or 53 foot trailer and a 3 axle tractor.

What you'd do is back up to the dolly, grab it's chains and shove them inside the frame and hook them to these hooks by the pintle hook. When you tug on the dolly, it straightens it out and lines it up. Then what you do, is you put it in reverse and FLOOR IT and ram that dolly as hard as you ########## can. On your 8th or 9th try, it the pintle ring on the dolly would actually latch into the coupler inside the tractor frame. Then you take the chains off, twist them up to take the slack out, and re-hook them. There were also glad hands inside the frame for the dolly's hoses.

You pull the safety pins out of the tractor's 5th wheel and slide it all the way up against the back of the cab. Then you replace the pins, and slide the dolly's 5th wheel up onto the tractor frame. There were paint marks on the tractor frame telling you where to put the 5th wheel. You'd put the pins in place and go hook up your 48 footer.

It was a pain in the ### though. Yellow didn't have this type of equipment so one time at the Kansas City rail-yard a Yellow driver saw me trying to ram the #### out of the dolly and came over thinking I was insane or something. He had no idea that our Jifflox dollies were made to double as a tag axle on the tractor.