Weight distribution

I hauled 44k about a week ago. It was loaded against the step to 5' before the front trailer axle. I only had 27k on my drives. More was on my spread. I found that interesting as I am still learning how to properly load my trailer.

I figured I would have weight more on my drives.

 

How was the load centered on your tailer? York description sounds about right. I'm sure the center of your load was shifted to the rear of the center of the trailer.

 

going from the center of the spread to the kingpin doesn't work. Because anything behind the front axle of the spread is weight on the trailer, not truck. My stepdeck, which also has a short kingpin centers weight about 5 feet in front of the physical center of trailer. And as Oscar mentioned even centering the load well ahead of center it seems to just fail to load the drives appropriately unless you actually put something heavy on the top deck. I have to fight with shipper's pretty hard some times, they go for the middle of that bottom deck and it doesn't work. Actually needs to be loaded nearly to the front of bottom deck.

 

Of course, it still works. You should know the weight your axles put to the ground. Place a known weight on the rear of your trailer and add that weight to the axle weight. Now you can add weight to the rest of your trailer and be able to get the drives and trailer axle weights balanced. Knowing the center of the trailer is just one step to balancing your weight. From the center you can shift forwards or backwards to place more or less weight on your axle groups. It does get more difficult if you are loading a mixed load and more simple if it is a uniform load with known weights. This method is better than swagging it and running back and forth to the scales. The middle of the bottom deck is not the middle of the trailer.

 

Weight gets "hairy" when you're loaded near max gross weight, doesn't it? You'll see the weight shift 1,800lbs to 2,000lbs to your drives by spreading the trailer axle. Check the states that you'll be going through and proceed from there. If the states allows running in spread then do so because 34k is hard to match exactly on a tandems.