Sometimes i feel uncomfortable

The loads that bite drivers on the ### aren't the ones that you are uncomfortable with, they are the ones that "I have hauled a million times, but today something went wrong".

 

Yep, really. Gunner, I've been hauling coils just a bit linger than you. But I gotta say that 42,000 pounder behind ya counts as a baby coil to me. I ran with Fraley and Schilling before I did my stretch with BTC. Over there, my average coils were 52,000 lbs. Light weight fleet, light weight trailers, and heavy loads were the order of the day.

Heck, my second coil ever was every bit of 55,000 lbs.! Put right up on my max overall weight. Hauled that miserable sonuvagun from Dundalk all the way to Detroit, and be buggered if I didn't cut neat little holes in my seat on EVERY turn, ramp, or curve in the road!

There are old flatbedders, and there are bold flatbedders. But brother, there AIN'T no old, bold flatbedders!

 

Amen.

But it's not just people who don't care, it's those not given the skills to understand what they are dealing with.

 

Try hauling a precast vault @ 46,000# in the center of the trailer and watch it rock side to side as your going down the road. Most of my loads I feel secure when I'm rolling but you always have that gut feeling, " What if ?"

 

Not sure if you ever saw these over in the photo thread, but they scared me every time I took them out. And I did 9 loads of them.



15K per tank, 125,000 gross.

 

I'm not afraid of a load but I sure as hell won't be afraid of turning down a load picking get up at womble pipe yard or tapping in 105 degrees going 2 miles down the road with sun forecasted for 3 days.

Maybe I'm spoiled but if I was going to sit in a pipe yard for 12 hours unpaid, I might as well drive a van and not have the headaches of open deck. But I chose open deck, so I will choose to not do the bottom of the barrel open deck loads for the same reasons.

When I worked expedite, the one thing they drilled in my head was work smarter not harder.

 

Precast boxes get me the same way. Had one last year that picked the right hand tires off the ground on a corner on the interstate. Needless to say, the rest of the trip was real slow in the corners. 42k box on a spring ride flatbed raises the pucker factor to 11 out of 10 now...lol

Was on the phone and as always looked back in the mirror and the other driver only heard "Oh ####" about 3 times while I was getting the tires back on the ground.

Now I prefer to move them on a lowboy. We were taking 11 foot tall boxes a couple of weeks ago on stepdecks and I snapped under a lowboy instead. Harder to get into the job site but more comfortable for me.

 

Nowadays, it seems like I mostly pull a stretch Rgn. I'm paranoid about the Rgn. Biggest fear isn't losing the load, it's getting high centered on a railroad or hitting a bridge.