Shotgun coils.

Yep I've felt like i was pulling the great pryamid behind be. Put 50k on the deck when ya got a 238 between the seats and you would swear they screwed up and put 2 coils on you. With those old small engines little small hills feel like huge mountains.

 

Some of the places we deliver to don't even have an overhead crane. One in particular takes these coils (40,000lbs and up)and loads them into shipping containers, then their trucks take them to the port. All of this is done in a small yard using forklifts.

 

Except when the customer needed, I always loaded shotgun. But you would have never know because I had a covered wagon.

 

Coils DESTROY trailers-

Even trailers with coil packages (x-members 6 inches on center) End up with Tail damage Top plate(floor) ripping apart from main beams, or nose damage (Kingpin plate)

Every bump in our roads you hit is bone breaking on the trailers weak points.

Your Best Bet in hauling coils is a 20 foot ALL STEEL valley trailer..A Valley trailer has a Giant Steel Gulley built into the trailers top plate and floor for unsurpassed strength running the length of the trailer- Very Common in the 70's and 80's

If your going to own a typical 48-53 foot combo flatbed or aluminum- You better be very handy with a welder after a few years, Cause the trailer will not last- No Matter the Manufcturer

 

You could see it happen too with a trailer long enough. The Ravens covered wagon in which I always cheered about in my experience as being very good for what it did was essentially aluminum. When you belly load that monster 52000 on the middle ... it almost cries out in a way. And when the coil is off you can tell particular planks of decking needs some TLC if not outright replacement to continue to maintain where possible the integrity. Not to mention going over all the welds constantly on that trailer.

The decking and large frame rails under it is a bridge. If you viewed it end to end it's a arch. As it was made to have from the factory. Monster coil onto that thing and chained. The arch flattens out. Now I don't know about you, but I always marveled at seeing so much metal flatten out under a load like that. Whoo.

I don't know of any trailer I had ever in my life time that I knew better than I knew my wife physically to use a bad comparison. But I can almost even now sit down and consider some of the damage points that became evident on that Ravens over a period of months to a year or so. Most all of it is indeed directly related to the loads we imposed on that poor thing. But wow. What a trailer.

It isnt a super trailer though. You can absolutely break it. And I guess it speaks for not abusing that thing when I had it. And for that I can be happy.

 

Like I say- To the guys hauling coils- Don't use a 48 footer- Too Long

Use a 20' tri axle all steel- Last a long time

These maunfactureres think- "We'll just put more crossmember in the Coil area" That's NOT where the damage occurs- The Front and Back Get physically abused BADLY

 

I don't know why we did not get to use those trailers. The closest thing to what you describe is actually a coil cover equipped rail car. You could put 150000 pounds onto it, as it was specifically designed to haul it, and a whole lot of it.

Such a trailer you described would need to be around 35 feet and with three axles in the back I think you can scale that legally. We did that in containers all the time. Hell some of the 20 foot boxes had triaxle chassis and at weights that were truly epic for the time, and never once have I thought about such chassis failing. When you consider 55000 pounds in 20 feet container box which I think was the capacity for weight at that time in the 80s... (No wonder we were heavy...) that was what we did.

Why they did not adapt or build coil trailers of that style I don't know. We did not have those back in our time. OR our company did not buy those on purpose.

 

I’ve seen trailers designed exactly like that, for that purpose, dragging coils up & down SH 146 locally between Baytown & Mont Belvieu, TX, when I am in that area.

Short, stout looking trailers with a cradle in the middle that the coil sits down in.

Obviously trying to do any OTR with those trailers would be impossible, unless you had dedicated coil loads on either end of the run, but the trailers look stout enough to hold up to the abuse coils will put on it.

 

I have a picture somewhere deep in my stuff, I don't know exactly where it was taken. But I witnessed a bulk ship of about 600 foot unloading steel coil. What struck me was this thing had coils three wide on the dock all the way down the length of the ship. And stacked three deep in a sort of a pyramid shape.

When you consider all those coils came from that vessal considering it's nothing but framing every 8 feet or so over 1/2 inch steel hull plates welded... it's a incredible tonnage cross ocean. I think I can calculate roughly the total steel on that dock from that ship if I have enough math and paper to do it on.

 

No you haven't. We move heavier than that on Rietnour Big Bubbas all the time.

Heck, I dragged a 57,000 pounder from Louisville to Lordstown, OH on my flatdeck. Suicide loaded, too.