My daily journal of Trucking School

Logs,

You are right about the post trip. I am in orientation with Tyson right now and he taught us that today actually. I just got out of school and they taught us to do a complete pretrip. But if you read the regs it says the pretrip is just a walk around to satisfy that the truck is ready to roll. The complete inspection is when you shut down, then you dont have as much to inspect before you start a new day.

 

you could come up missing a catalytic converter, somebody could cut a hose...who knows what else

 

Is anyone else suspicious of a trucking school instructor who on one hand says "run legal", but on the other instructs students how to shave the books?

All of this in the first few days of training.

 

im not talking about shaving the books. i talked about with werner that if you start to drive at 7 minutes into the 15 that the computer goes back to the top of the 15, and when you stop before the computer reaches 7 min it goes back to the top and you get a couple extra miles in before you stop. you can not cheat on a computer with werner. the same way you adjust if you were doing a paper log ,you either go forward or back to round off if you dont start out at exactly 15, 30, 45, minute mark. i never told anyone to shave books, i simplly told them how werners computers work. maybe ask them to recall what the subject was at the time i talked about logbooks.

 

Abso-freakin-lutely... ALWAYS get out, after any time in the sleeper, and at a minimum:

1. Check to make sure no joker has pulled your 5th wheel. I was sitting in a truck stop in Virginia when some guy, parked directly across from me, in a fully loaded grain bucket pulled out of his spot. After he started his turn out of the spot, the trailer came unhooked and slid towards me, stopping just short of hitting the front of my truck. He spent a hell of a long time cranking the trailer back up with the dolly in low gear. On the same note, check the trailer tandem slide pin for the same thing.

2. Especially in the crime ridden big cities, check to make sure you have all your tires and that they're aired up. Someone tried to appropriate the tires off my trailer in Fontana, CA and apparently got interrupted halfway through... half the lug nuts were laying on the ground.

3. Check your air lines/pigtail and trailer lights... you sure don't wanna be running down the road without 'em.

 

Actually, I do a walk-around every time I am getting back into the truck - which is several times a day. I do a much more thorough inspection in the morning before that baby ever moves an inch.

I was standing outside of a Union 76 truckstop once, a long time ago. I had just gotten done eating at the restaurant, and was just content to stand there and watch the traffic on the Interstate, which of course was running right by this place and was in full view.

I had to do a doubletake when I saw - wheel with tire - going however fast that truck was going - flying right towards the truckstop. If that thing had hit anyone, someone would have died or been in serious hurt. If it would have hit a car - who knows what would have happened. I never forgot seeing that thing cruising by me at at least 50 mph, probably a lot faster, really coudn't tell - it went off into the darkness and frankly, I don't know WHAT stopped it excepting that there wasn't anything but fields in the direction it was moving. It kinda motivated me to start doing much better inspections.

Another thing I have seen on highways and freeways on occasion are tires on fire. One tire blows, the driver doesn't notice it, it gets hot, hotter, everything gets hot, next thing you know, there are flames shooting out the side of that trailer's tandems. One particular driver I tried to call, flag down, everything. Not sure when he finally stopped, I gave up. Figure after both tires blow out on one axle on the same side, you might start to notice it? lol

I know I've gotten a bit off-topic, but safety should be top priority on any driver's list of things to pay attention to. Some might say doing all those walkarounds and checking everything would be a pain-in-the-***, but when you get into a habit, a routine, of doing things like that, it happens as automatically as you pushing in the parking brake when you stop the truck to park it.

 

EXACTLY! Many need to come to this agreement and maybe we will start having less accidents due to maintenance issues

Just my humble opinion.

I had a driver tell me today he had a level 3 inspection and he was logging the way I told him (although he was not filling out the inspection form, which I would have written him up if I was an officer) and the officer passed him, because most are just looking they have 15 minutes on their line 4 for their pre-trip or post-trip. So that's why no one gets dinged because most drivers do one or the other, however the correct way is the post-trip inspection.

 

Ok here are the 2 styles of remembering which way to turn the wheel.
1. Hand on bottom turn the wheel the way you want the trailer (tail end) to go.
2. Hand on top of wheel turn the opposite of the way you want it to go.
3. SLOW SLOW SLOW
4. If you realize you need to correct it ITS TO LATE.

Just some of the things to remember and backing is 10 percent knowledge and 90 percent practice there is no magic formula i wish there were but its practice and experience and some days you can back into the eye of a needle and some days you can't put it in a cow pasture. so just take your time and remember to go slow. I all ways taught students in a deep reduction 15 speed in low low reverse you could walk faster than it would move and it seemed to help.