Hats off to log truck drivers.

After herding a logger in the woods during Winter the rest of it is easy. Welcome to off road driving. You done good.

 

Picked up a load of hickory logs on my flatbed a few weeks ago. That road was the death knell for all the cabinets in my Columbia. They're a bit quieter held closed with tarp straps, at least.

 

I remember before I had my CDL, I had a sawmill business (was only 21, super green) and my logger's driver didn't show up, so he let me drive his boom truck to his site and he drove his 18 wheeler, well didn't I #### my pants driving back loaded and going around a pretty tight corner without slowing down enough and learning about loads with a high center of gravity. Gained a lot of respect for loggers / truckers that day.

 

i had geotheral well we worked on the road thru the trees we would hit our mirrors getting thru them. View attachment 72271

 

I drove a log truck for a little over a month. My truck had a built in scale (which was not the norm) so my truck ran 92,000lb every time. I had a friend who would end up over 100,000 75% of the time. The airbags were completely fubar on the 4 bunk trailer I was pullin, so the owner welded a huge bracket bypassing the springs all together lol.

And the roads are scary as hell to lol. I constantly thought about getting a bite guard the ride was so rough.

There's all kinds of craziness goin on in "the log woods" as we call it. Log trucking is the most "outlaw" trucking ive seen so far

 

There's a facebook page called old logging photos. It's crazy. Trees were huge then and the trucks scary.

 

Log trucking is fun. Taking a T/T down roads most wouldn't venture onto in their pickup...getting the rig turned around to get loaded on the side of a goat path, and then getting the grossly overloaded truck back out of the woods again...dodging the scales and the DOT (who seemed to have a hard-on for log trucks) to get the logs to the mill. After doing that for a while, "normal" trucking is rather boring.

Been end dumping for a while now...not near as much fun as log hauling, but it has its moments. Always fun arriving at a job in a 60' long T/T combination for a job that SHOULD have been bid as a tandem job...like when you have to blind-side the 39' trailer off a 13' wide chip & seal road with ditches on both sides into a 25' wide gravel driveway. Always fun to do the "impossible" and make it look easy...impresses the customer, too...until the next truck shows up with an ex-OTR driver behind the wheel and they smash his new culvert, knock down the mailbox, and run over the flowers trying to get into the same driveway only to give up and dump the load at the end of the driveway so nobody else can get in or out until the mess is cleaned up...

 

This is an oldie but a goody. Not sure I could do this in my Pete.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cus-Pq_jqhs