(627G) Scraper hauling

Hey guys, I have a few questions if you would humor me.

I am part of a small dirt contracting company that has fortunately stumbled upon a rather nice opportunity. One of our customers (He's a 1%er) bought a huge ranch with apparently no roads on it whatsoever, and wants us to spend upwards of 3 months building roads, among other things this coming year. I really don't have any solid details to share other than it is 900 miles away from our "home base".

As the youngest member of our small family business, I see this distance as an opportunity for us to acquire a good high horsepower truck that is capable of pulling the mountains, and outfitting our current tri-axle load king trailer to be able to pull around our scrapers.

For years we have simply "gotten by", and let other people haul them for us, or drove them from site-to-site as we do not like to travel far very often, but this is one of those opportunities too good to pass up. Not only will we be getting paid for the machinery freight, but there is also a fair amount of aggregate that will be hauled to cover the roads with belly dumps or side dumps that this truck could be put to work doing.

That being said, are there any good rules of thumb for putting together rigs hauling 86600 lbs? We have plenty of trucking experience hauling dozers and trackhoes "over the rivers and through the woods", but scrapers are a bit of a different animal to us. We would most likely be going after a Mack, possibly with a small flat-top sleeper, and outfitting it with a tag axle/wet kit, and adding a booster to our trailer. Route would be Wyoming/Montana/Nebraska/South Dakota, not in that order obviously.

Any input I can get from the professionals would be greatly appreciated, any questions I will do my best to try and answer.

Also, I will be bribing you with pictures for every helpful response I get, I know the heavy haul guys like their yellow machinery.

I'll start the bribing off with this http://imgur.com/a/wSbKA

These are pictures of when our company was in Texas building swine confinements for National Farms/Seabord. Lagoons and big building pads. I was in 2nd or 3rd grade at the time, you can barely see me standing in the motorgrader with my dad in the first picture. My grandpa is sitting there in his overalls on the sheepsfoot packer without the cab. The 627F's are brand-new out of the factory machines, back when the EPA was nothing but a bad dream.

 

We have been weighing this. Our current lowboy truck is a 1988 mack RD688 with a tag axle. Its what...350 HP? It's not as simple of a situation as you may think. We have been "just getting by" for a long, long time. Equipment is getting bigger, and it is getting harder to justify spending money on a truck that as it ages, we will get less money back out of as we are doing repairs and improvements to it. Just doing the hauling of our dozers and trackhoes up there with it makes me cringe, as a stiff headwind makes it difficult to get the thing up to 55. I know, I know, heavy hauling speed kills, wanting to drive the speed limit isn't my main motivation to make an equipment change. The bobtailing and inefficiencies of the trip aren't going to matter, we will be able to charge for our time.

We do have other heavy machinery. D8's, 32ton class trackhoes, and our rural area dictates that we do a lot of heavy hauling up steep graded country roads. The mack can pull it, but its in the bottom 2 holes and you better be on top of your ####.

Small family business. Little to no overhead personnel wise. We would be getting an upgrade that, as far as our fleet goes, is the only "hole".

You're right, but it will help offset the bulk of the cost of a new (to us, not brand new) rig. Good rear ends is why we would be going with a Mack. I wouldn't expect hauling the machinery to and from location to pay for it, and the opportunity is there to put it to work at a good pace with no pressure. The aggregate that it would be hauling is of the kind that you get going about 30 MPH and open the gates and spread out the material on the road, and the grader makes a pass on everything at the end of the day and there's the road. Getting stuck will be a non issue. I'm going to put a trusted friend in it, tell him to drive 55 on the highway and 25 on the dirt roads, and send a bill at the end of the month.

I'm not so concerned with the business sense of the deal, as I am pretty sure it is a no lose situation - moreso feedback from all of you fine experts about mistakes you made putting together an outfit, and what works "ideally". Thank you for the response though!

 

If I could find an early model Titan for reasonable $$$ I think that would be perfect. They are kind of a rare unit, and I havn't heard much about how they do with their regen/epa outfits. More familiar with the yellow stuff as far as that goes.

 

Great stuff, thank you!

 

Really this would be about ideal, an older truck (pre '06) thats been overhauled. Older trucks that are in good shape are pretty tough to find, everyone is snapping them up and putting daycabs on them. Corn went crazy the last few years and all the farmers got new trucks, all the #### going on in the Bakken has also driven up prices of trucks...we've been looking for a long time on this deal but havn't really seen anything much worth biting on.