Air suspension

I'd say no, there's nothing that you can/can't do to affect this. Unless you've been racing down really rough roads or something, this is just a normal wear and tear thing. Possibly the bag may have been faulty to an extent, or maybe at some point an item may have hit it off the road. But I can't see you being able to harm them, unless it was intentional.

 

It happens from time to time. The bags are in constant motion when you are moving, pressures change in them, and like any other piece of rubber, they are exposed to weather conditions and deterioration. Once in a while, they just fail. I blew one out last year, but I had about 100,000 inside the trailer at the time, so it wasn't really the bags fault. A few years ago, I stopped in at the local Volvo dealer to pick up some parts we had ordered. I parked the truck, walked towards the shop, and heard a tremendous bang from the truck. One of the airbags supporting the cab had exploded. Why at that moment, I will never know. I went in, and added one of those to the shopping list. they had it in stock, had it changed about an hour later.

 

Burky, lemme guess, you were at M&K, right?
I got lucky, I had a cab airride bag blow on me (going down the road, scared the crap out of me) coming out of Stanwood (Ice mountain, of course) and was thankfully driving past. They fixed it up, and got me going. Why it failed, who knows, but it did.

 

Actually, yes, it was at M&K's old location in Kalamazoo near the Perkins restaurant. Murphy's law that day, the part failed in the dealers driveway.

As for the load with 100k inside the trailer, the plant loaded it, and I had no idea how much they had put in. And i was only taking the load about 200 foot or so before unloading it. The brand new customer asked me if i could do some interplant work for them, shuttling material from one storage bin to the other, so it's not like I attempted to take that weight down the highway. I drove out of the loading bay about 3 truck lengths, backed up about 40 foot, and hooked up the hose to unload. I guessed the weight by the time it took me to unload. 50k 1.5 hours, 3 hours must means about 100k.

By the way, I made about 70 dollars for that 200 foot load, and I will leave it to others to figure out what i made per mile. I did the numbers one time just for fun, and it was pretty healthy. LOL!!!

 

I think I heard about that last time I was in Edmonton...

 

At one of our customers in Chicago, we have three trucks stationed there preloading trailers for the road drivers to pick up, plus we provide shuttle work to the plant as well. In the last few weeks, I have hit a couple of trailer that were dropped so low I barely managed to get under them. We all figured it was the new guy they had hired there, and I stopped one day to mention the problem (not the person) to the site sup we have there. before i got the words out, he knew it was about the low trailers, and it turned out they were working on the problem. One of the old yard trucks had a suspension problem, and the front bags were not filling properly when the truck was loaded. And it resulted in low trailers. They were working on the problem, and have since solved it.

We drivers had to do some cranking to make it work and to get hooked up, but these sort of things can happen.