Things newbies should know, that they may not.

When I was running hopper I picked up a preloaded trailer that had me grossing 83,000 when I scaled out . When I asked for some to be taken off the customer said . "How long have you been driving for this company ? This is what most drivers haul " Another customer asked me " Do you want a good load or a legal load ? " I complained to another driver that a load loaded where there was no scale grossed 90,000 lbs. when I delivered it . He said "I couldn't make any money if I didn't run 90,000lbs. "
I quit that job after I complained I was usually only grossing $700 a week and they advertised $750 - $1,000 . I was told I was logging wrong . Not hard to figure out . Pay averaged $10 per hour . I was logging a legal 70 . Drivers making $800 -$900 a week were running 80 or 90 hours a week .

 

Just cause you can put 40k on a spread axle does not mean you can gross 86k

 

Double check the dock lock that latches on to your bumper when loading/unloading. Just because the light is green and the dock workers says your good, doesn't mean it released you properly.

Yes, learned that the hard way.

 

There are vast numbers of experienced OTR drivers that confuse this all of the time. Because drivers use "bridge law" and "kingpin law" interchangeably they think the point is to get the weight distributed over all the axles properly, and that almost always means paying attention to tandem weights and hardly ever about the length, measures various ways by various states.

My company has used drivers with 1-2 decades od experience happiliy tooling down the road with tandems slid fully to the rear on a 53 foot trailer. When you ask them about this the answer is 100% "but the trailer is empty." The overlength laws/regs don't consider the weight. Empty/loaded/in-between is of no consequence to the over-length regs.

Your gross weight must be OK, your axle weights must be OK, and the length must be OK.

You have to know the limits, usually in the front of the Rand-MacNally, for each state. Another good reason to have the atlas and not just rely on GPS.

 

In winter,don't eat the yellow snow.

 

Another reason that newbies should pick a starter company that will TRAIN!
There's more to diving than shifting gears.
Pick a company that has a COMPLETE training program.
And for you other old timers that want to argue "I didn't need that to get started...", remember...many of these laws have been written while we were driving.
Look at the kingpin law...who heard of it before 53's?
Gross weights? Every state use to have it's own before the feds standarized it.
And all the nuances of log books that have come around in the last few years.
(sits back in his rocking chair)

 

roll SLOWLY thru the truckstop with your windows down bumpin rap music UP Lights on HIGH and laying on your HORN at every person you see. You wont believe all the nice firendly people who think your the badest dude around