Best strategy: New load and how much gas in tanks before geting the load

I agree with Scuby. Where I worked we haul alot of beer and scrap paper.
Scrap paper or even roll stock paper loads are notoriously heavy
Whenever I knew I was loading either of these loads I would fill the fuel tanks and weigh asap. As Scuby said, these two products usually weigh you going in empty so they can put the absolute most weight you can carry! My thought is if I go in with quarter tank of fuel, then they load me in a way that the most fuel I can carry is a quarter fuel, but if I go with full tanks and they load legal, I can fill my tanks and not have to worry about the weight. I drove a co truck, owner-ops might see it differently.
If you load scrap paper somewhere that doesnt have a scale they often underestimate the weight of the bails of scrap, trouble with a capital T!

 

Even on paper a fuel stop is only 15 minutes off the 70 ... Elogs for 50 gallons, 3 minutes tops.

Not his trailer ... doesn't cost him anything, other than his time.

 

Correct me if i'm wrong here, but I think a driver should know how much their truck weighs empty and with full tanks of fuel. Now considering one gallon of diesel weighs 7.15 pounds...300 gallons = 2,145 pounds...you should have a pretty good idea how much you weigh, factoring in how much fuel is in your tanks, before you get to the shipper. Make sense?

 

in the past I have refused to sign for loads because they put too much weight on me. Especially when I knew I had to stop for fuel.

The scale guy and the guy loading weren't talking and when the manager got involved he got a bit pissed at them both.

He told them when a driver tells them to put so much on, listen to the driver, it's his truck, not yours. The guy running the grain chute was gone the next time I came in a couple weeks later.

 

exactly, I know roughly what my tractor weighs with full tanks and at half tanks, after that, it's a variable depending on the container and chassis I'm hauling.

 

The problem is at some it doesn't matter what you tell them, it matters what you show them. It's a problem I run into a lot at the same place. Every time I have to do the whole song and dance of telling them the load will be over, them loading it anyways, scale it to prove it, then they finally remove it. Seems if they listened in the first place we'd both save a lot of time.

 

50 gallons, not $50 bucks lol. $1.4 a mile and like Mystic wrote, only a few minutes of actual time to fuel on elogs. Most of the time I log "On Pretrip' to start my day for about 4 minutes then ease on over to the fuel pump and change statues to 'On Fuel' for about 6 more minutes then idle on out to the big road still On Duty, Not Driving, as log as I don't go over 17 miles per hour it will stay there all day.
When it gets up to that magic 15 minutes, then I start grabbing gears. You can't beat the efficiency of elogs.

Right, it's a company trailer. Even if I had to pay for it myself, a tax writeoff anyways. Consider how much CSA points it costs your career by not getting it fixed.

 

next time your empty, with full tanks, go scale your truck. That will give you a baseline figure to work off. I know that with my tractor, 3/4 tanks, a typical 53' EMHU container/chassis combo I will weigh 35,600 lbs to 36,000 lbs. Hence, I will not take any load that weighs more than 44,000 lbs. My tractor with 1/2 tanks weighs about 18,160. My truck has twin 120 gal tanks.

 

I have a customer that's like that also, until the 5th time they paid detention charges. Typically would take 90 minutes to load, I was always overweight. Would have to go and scale, come back, show them I was over, have them unload the overage. Meanwhile, the clock didn't stop ticking, we give 2 hrs free, after that it's $75/hr driver detention, they would typically get charged 1hr to 1.5 hrs of det. time. After the 5th time, when I told them that the 46,000 lbs load they wanted to put on me was too heavy they listened.