backing help for a newby

Practice. practice, practice. Backing is 9 parts art, 1 part science. Remember GOAL
Get
Out
And
Look
After a while your gut while tell you where your trailer is. For now, practice, practice, and practice. Rent a truck and trailer from Ryder if you can. Heck, use your pick up and a U-Haul if you have to. Same principles, smaller scale, easier learning curve. Crawl, walk, run.

 

The dreaded backing.... Boilermaker said it all Practice. I use to get to shipper or consignee late at night so that I could be infront of the dock hoping they would let me use the door I picked I seemed to just be afraid. the trailer looked so far back their the longest car I had was a cadillac and I hated backing that. Now 10 years later it is still get out and look I don't care if it is 3 or 4 times there will be days you hit the dock on the first time get it in right between 2 trucks with rocks infront on the right with snow piled up. The next time you go to the same docks your the only one there and it takes you a half hour to get in the dock and your lopsided. Laugh it happens to us all and if the say it doesn't they are fibbing. Just keep practicing, you will get the hang of it. I had a lot of problems at first went to pulling a step deck for about 4 years and then went back to van. Hope the new trainer works out if not get another one. You're the one who needs the practice not the trainer push them to help you and have a safe and fun time remember to laugh at your self it will help
Nanny :smt023

 

it takes practice. Nobody is perfect in backing. Everybody has those days that everything just goes right , even the backing. Then there's the days that you just can't back up for ****. it happens to all of us. i have talked to guys who have driven 20-30 yrs and they still have there bad days. just practice and it will come to you. You know you know what you are doing when you mess up and know how to correct it. It is all about the approach and set up. good luck , don't worry you will get it.

 

My first tractor trailer driveing job was pulling a 53ft trailer to the
same terminel every night. The most important thing that I learned
was to take my time and not be rushed. The terminel was small and
there was little room. Other drivers would have to wait for you while
you backed in so they could get by. I saw other drivers damage trailers
because they would rush to back up so they could go clock in. I learned
as a new driver that if I set up wrong and others were waiting for me,
to circle again to get set up right. Also I found that if a backed up really
slow, it was posible to bump the trailer next to me without damageing it.
I did not make that a habit. But I did see other newbies fired just because
they were in a hurry and wrecked. Some of the terminels (includeing
this one) were built before 53ft trailers existed and
can be chalenging even for
experienced drivers. You sometimes have to roll your landing gear most
of the way down before you back in cause it is too tight. All it takes is
one preventable accident to set your career back several years.

 

It should be said that there isn't one correct way to back up. 2 drivers going into the same dock may go about it differently. I'm a "turn the trailer as much as you can while still going forward" kind of guy, while others will drive straight past the dock and start the turn from a perfect 90 degree angle. Sometimes the dock dictates how you approach it. As the others have said, it just takes practise. 16 years later I still get messed up the odd time.

 

When my roommate went for training back in '85, he had three weeks of training. He didn't 'get' backing until the last day. What he did was go out and buy a toy tractor trailer, and he did backing manuevers with it so he could see what the tractor and trailer were doing during the manuevers. He 'played' with it for awhile until the complete physics of it were burned in his brain and then practiced all kinds of backing manuevers with it to see what it did. He says that getting that total picture in his head helped him to understand how he had to set up, what the trailer was going to do, and what he needed to do to get the trailer to do what he wants. He still uses GOAL and yes, he's had his bad days too, but he swears that without the mental pictures he got with that toy truck, he would never have mastered backing. At the outset it sounded silly, but after giving it some thought, it made sense. Give it a try, it couldn't hurt.

 

Getting out and looking, and developing the "eye" that goes with it is probably the most important thing. If the wheels on the trailer are all the way at the back of the trailer, then where they go is where the trailer will go. If they are set ahead of the rear, remember that the back end swings beyond them, and that has to be accounted for.

It just takes time and practice, it doesn't come overnight. I admit, it isn't an area that gives me much trouble, but 20 years of towing, pushing, and directing aircraft on flight decks within inches of each other gives me an advantage in knowing how things react to my inputs.

But you can learn it, with the application of time and some practice.

 

It takes time and oneday it will CLICK....something will happen and it will become easy to hit the hole...

GET OUT AND LOOK

If it takes 30min to hit a hole much better than the 3hrs writing reports ant talking to the company when you hit something.

K