Carefully not being overloaded

I remember going through this trying to figure out my weight limits and had a whole bunch of people on here giving me info yet I was still confused. I finally asked a DOT officer and got another answer but it seemed logical. Then I did what everyone else suggested went and got a scale ticket empty to see my true weight and used the formula from that to figure out my total allowed weight. Hope you get the same help. Have a Merry Christmas

 

I can tell you from first hand experience, the Wally-Mo 4-car weighs in at exactly 10,000#

 

How do you like that sleeper? It looks a bit small but much better than my back seat.

 

I'm registered for 38,000# and it is usually enough. Actually physically, it's too much for my 3500 with 6/7 Diesel and 6-speed with 3.73s but I've been babying it for the better part of 100,000 miles and have decided to take it off the road before I wear the poor truck out. I started with 27,000 miles and have ~130,000 now with no major breakdowns. A recent oils change in all the boxes came up with almost no metal; only a little metal dust in the original trans and rear oils. I change my engine oil every 10,000 miles. I digress.

Your limiting factor will be those drive tires, my friend. You cannot find anything over 11,340# so you will exceed that regularly when fully loaded even with the #1 and #2 cars on backwards. Not to mention what the sticker on your door post says (it may be around 9,600 maximum on that rear axle.) For the Wally-Mo, with those 2 10,000" axles and dual wheels for a total of eight tires on the ground back there, your good there.

I was toying with the possibility of finding a wrecked 5500 to upgrade the rear suspension and axle but I believe there will be the differential ratio problem but at least you can go from 17"-wheels to 19.5s with a substantially-higher maximum tire allowance.

Does this help you in any way?

 

Chris, sorry still very busy with work.

The DOT can and will look at all ratings. The rule of thumb though, never exceed each individual axle rating. For instance if you have a 3500 dually with a 9,600 lb rear axle rating that axle needs to scale out at 9,600 lbs or less when it's crossing a scale. Same thing goes for steer and trailer axles, never exceed their ratings. Second, they can look at your tire ratings as well. If the 4 tires on your dually rear axle DON'T have a combined rating of 9,600 lbs and you've maxed the rear axle rating out you're in violation. Make sure your tire ratings meet your axle ratings.

Our trailers ( that we use here ) have three 7,000 lb axles yet our trailer gvw is 24,999 lbs. the reason they can rate our trailers with a higher gvw than our trailer axle capacity is because they know with our bridge setting a lot of that weight will transfer over to the drive axle of the truck.

I've been running IRP registration for many years. In the application they have weight ranges you can choose from, nothing exact to your specific truck and trailer set up usually though. In 2014/2015 they started making us choose a much higher rating than we normally would've. I use to register my 3500 Ram and three axle lowboy at 36,000 lbs under IRP. Now they're making me register at 40,000 with the same truck and trailer configuration. My equipment, it'll never. Rosss a scale weighing 40,000 lbs.

They're also making me register for LTL 48 states and. Canadian provinces also. You use to be able to just pick the states that you wanted to run in. For instance I might of chose 11 western, or maybe 5 western states, where I do a lot of work.

I load a lot of these style trucks and I have a self imposed freight weight limit I came up with. For instance I won't load more than 16,000 lbs of freight on any of the trucks we run. I do this for safety, to get the best possible fuel mileage, and to Make our trucks last.

And keep in mind I'm not looking to load 16,000 lbs on our equipment. the fact is many of the loads we move weigh from 4,000 lbs to 8,000 lbs. if we were after heavier loads we'd be running bigger trucks and trailers.

 

The driver loves it. He's been talking about having a second truck built the exact same way.