Scale help

That's different. It's one thing if you either can't hit a cat scale before a state scale and get pinched or can't get legal due to loading or kingpin lengths. If the driver doesn't scale or pay attention like your driver, I support sticking it to him.

 

Did we hear from the OP if this got taken care of?

 

In that you are right but, that is just a bad driver that needs to be canned. He is costing you more than he is worth.

 

He had it scaled and that was as close as he could get it without the trailer tandems being over on length. It was his first ticket for anything in his 31 years of driving in a CMV and even in a personal vehicle. I think it hurt his pride a little more than it did his wallet. That isn't something I, or he, would quit over. The company we work for is a great company. We both run regional and get on avg 3500mi a week and home every night and off every weekend. Plus off time whenever we want it and 2 weeks paid vacation every year. Like I said, he would gladly eat the $ on the ticket instead of getting mad and leaving and going to a job where he has to be gone all the time over a $250 ticket.

 

There is something to be said about choosing your battles

 

Do like I did. Invest in the air weigh system for the truck and trailer it has never failed me yet and its extremly close each time to a cat scale. Best money I ever spent and that's no lie.

 

Indeed. Sometimes it is better to just bite the bullet.

 

That would be correct. Here's a recent example:

In September I picked up two beverage loads at the same shipper. The first time I had to return for a reload as it was loaded too heavy on the drives with the tandems all the way forward.

When I got dispatched back to the same place two weeks later and scaled the load at the nearby CAT scale, it was 34,400 on the tandems with the gross around 79K. I had enough room to slide, so everything was cool...or so I thought.

For the first time in my over 14 years of OTR, what I saw on the scale ticket isn't what registered in my brain. With the reload still fresh in my memory, I was so wary of being overweight on the drives, I mistook the overage to be on the drives and moved the tandems one hole forward instead of one hole backward!

The load went from Tolleson AZ to Lathrop CA. I took the scenic route and crossed the Colorado River at Parker instead of Blythe. The Tehachapi scale must have been closed, because everything went smoothly until I hit the Le Grand scale on 99 north. As soon as the steers got on the scale, the light turned red and I got pulled in.*

Inside when I was shown the axle weights, to my disbelief I was 800 pounds overweight on the trailer axles! I immediately pulled out the CAT scale ticket and discovered the horrible mistake.

OK, so that once-in-14-years mistake wasn't very likely to happen. But get this:

One of the trailer's air bags was bad. The bag still held air, but its base was way crooked, like at a 45 degree angle.

Talk about a "perfect storm" of events: the single time I misread a CAT scale ticket and get pulled in for it, one of the air bags happens to be messed up! (I was never in the habit of checking the air bags during my pretrips until this happened, and now that I do check them, I am discovering that the air bags are always fine. I still check them every time though.)

Here's what CHP did. They cited the air bag, but let the overweight go - no ticket!

On the air bag citation, where the driver is supposed to sign, they wrote instead "Owner Responsibility". California has a law where the equipment's owner can be cited instead of the driver if the citing officer deems it to be the owner's fault, or mostly the owner's fault.

A mechanic came out and replaced the air bag, I slid the tandems two holes back, then continued on my merry way up to Lathrop, arriving just in time for the delivery.

Talk about dodging a bullet! Or so I thought...

About six weeks later my FM sent me a message saying he just received a $237 citation from safety that I needed to authorize a payroll deduction for. Had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him to fax it to me. He did, and it turned out to be the air bag citation.

Hmmm...what to do?

Though I knew I wasn't legally obligated to pay it, and also knew the company had no knowledge of my CAT scale misread, my reply was "I hereby authorize a $237 payroll deduction for the 9/19 CA citation."

Yes sometimes it's best to bite the bullet...even if it's a boomerang bullet you dodged the first time around!

*The CHP officer inside said "We were waiting for you. We saw you were 800 pounds over way back when you were on 58." I inquired and he said they have scales in the road with the ability to identify what truck it is that's overweight. (The moral being, don't try to go around any CA scales, because if you're overweight, they probably already know!)

 

Agreed! Even a gusty enough downdraft might have caused that!

 

Going back to the OP, I think some info might have been left out, the only time I have ever had a shipper refuse to reload on an overweight, was because I told them how to load the trailer. With containers we are always loaded heavy, anytime the shipper asks me how I want it loaded, I ask them what their loading chart shows. If they tell me that don't have one, then I tell them how to load it, and I wait in the truck, with it idling and the trailer brakes released so my suspension gauge is semi close to accurate. I would say 75% of the places I load out of, have a policy of:
IF WE LOAD IT OUR WAY AND IT'S WRONG, WE MOVE IT........IF WE LOAD IT YOUR WAY AND IT'S WRONG, YOU MOVE IT OR YOU PAY US TO MOVE IT OR YOU ACCEPT THE LOAD AS IS.

I suspect, it was the latter and the driver doesn't want to pay, just my suspicion based on what I see. One of our bean shippers in Ne., had a SWIFTy O/O load one Friday afternoon, 45,500 lbs going to Fla.. They loaded him the way they normally do, it was over on the drives no matter what he did, they reloaded him, still over. So he told them how to load it, they did, now it was even worse. Since he opened his mouth, he accepted responsibility for the load, they told him it would be $50 to cut the load or reload it correctly, he balked, they left for the weekend. When they came back on Monday morning, he was sitting there, "hat in hand", actually $50.00 in hand for them to cut one pallet and reload it.