Swift Flatbed Division... ?!

Sorry there has been so much going on. Today I got a 100 out of 100 on my straight line backing. All of that picking the worst truck with no clutch, that has the trailer that students of repeatedly run into poles and potholes, worked in my favor when I jumped in one of their road testing trucks that is fully pretripped and aligned, with a new trailer and tires.

We are now working on the pretrip. Basically every part of the truck is properly mounted and secured, not cracked, bent or dented, no cuts, fraying or bulges, not leaking and has no unauthorized welds. Now to figure out what the hell the names of those things are.

We start this weekend on our sight side offset and blindside offset. This is a ton of stuff to learn and remember in 3 weeks. The learning curve is insane and no matter how much I read or studied before I came, watched videos of how it is done, or memorized the pretrip as if a Shakespearean monologue, it's completely different when the ### end of that trailer starts driving you, rather than the other way around.

 

We went to the back range today, which is set up as the current Texas DPS backing test.

1. Pull straight forward
2. Straight line back
3. Pull straight forward
4. Sight side offset
5. Blind side parallel

It's all one course. When you complete the offset, you pull forward until your dot bumper is lined up with the front cone and blindside parallel into an 85 foot box.

 

We have to get the trailer and the whole tractor into the box.

We start with the DOT bumper behind the back cones. We pull straight ahead, do a straight back, pull straight ahead, do a sight side offset, pull ahead and do a blind side parallel into the space we started in.

We have one pull-up allowed on the straight line back, with no GOAL. We can GOAL two times and we have two pull-ups for the offset and the blind side parallel.

Here is an example... The box at the bottom that we start in is actually 11x82 feet. We have like 6 inches on either side of the tractor backing in. Texas DPS ain't ####ing around. There will be no more CDL holders in Texas who don't know how to do whatever the hell they need to with that tractor and trailer.