Do not be lazy with your load securement. You can get cited and fired.

Last summer there was a truck sitting in the middle of i80 up in Nebraska. I say truck, but really it was just a trailer with a hole in the front and the frame of the truck.. The cab and driver was removed from the chasis by the steal coil that was loaded inside the dry van when he had to make a fast stop..

 

Shirley, you can't be serious??

 

Yea, it was sitting in the middle of i80 for a few days. I posted about it here and someone from the same company said that's what happened.

 

You know it!

Actually, I think it's to get me over 88,000 gross so I can get the extra cpm. With just the coil, I would have been about 87,000.

 

I don't haul coils (never found one that paid enough) but I'm surprised nobody mentioned potential damage to the trailer from the concentrated point load and apparent damage to bottom of the coil from same.

 

I'm guessing by your response that you don't pull an open deck and have never assembled a coil rack. The timbers aren't sitting on the deck, but rather held by the coil racks. If you placed the friction mats beneath the timbers, the only points of contact would be where the coil racks are located. There would be a gap the thickness of the coil racks between the friction mats and the timbers. By placing them under the coil racks, even if there isn't maximum pressure, there is still contact...meaning friction.

 

Thank you.

I'd been thinking about that whole line of discussion on this thread and couldn't for the life of me figure out why anyone would think putting friction mats under elevated boards would accomplish anything. The mats belong under the coil racks or just have a friction mat large enough to contain the entire assembly of coil racks (one per 10K lbs). It's not rocket science.

 

Well I've learned a few things I would never have even thought of. Things such as how coils are actually loaded. Friction mats? Never heard of them. Angle of chains? Wouldn't even think of it. About only one I knew could get you into trouble is does the chain get hooked on the inside or the outside of the rail on edge of trailer? I have no idea. I might have been able to determine where to put one relatively small footprint item that weighs a heck of a lot to make the weight legal (coil).

Y'all just keep buying groceries, ok?

 

They used a friction mat under my last load which was 3 large vessel bags full of lemon juice, about 14,000 pounds each.

 

I would say the friction mats are soft enough to absorb the thickness of the coil rack and disperse the pressure from the timber to the deck.
The coil rack will just sink into the rubber allowing the weight from the timber to be applied to the rest of the mat.. If they were running along the length of the timber. So even the center of the timber would still have some pressure applied to the deck through the mat.

If the mat was running along the length of the coil rack you would only have pressure where the timber and coil rack meet. only two pints of pressure for every rack used. The center of the coil rack isn't carrying any weight, what good is friction mat going to do there? as opposed to the center of a coil timber. The cil is sitting on the timbers and not the coil rack. The rack just takes a fraction of the weight to make sure the timbers don't move away from the coil.