driving down mountains in truck has no engine brake,how to handle that

One gear lower than used to get up hill is only if you have Jake's. And less than 7% grade down.
Without Jake's like on Mont Eagle you would need to be in 3rd loaded.
A series 60 loaded on Mont Eagle is 5th or 6th going down if you don't want to touch brakes. Isx or dd15 can go down that loaded in 9th.

 

Dude. Come on. 3rd?

 

read the signs, relax. Whatever is going to happen just sit back and enjoy the ride, being a relaxed body you can respond easier to situations when they crop up. Most of the grades you come at from a different direction so unless you come up first and then turn around you will not have a clue to what the grade is like.

 

Yup. If you have no Jake's and dont want to burn up your brakes.

 

Probably the same way someone from the 19th Michigan would handle fighting Fallujah today. They'd get slaughtered! At the current time for both though, they are the best to offer.

 

Wrong. Who told you this? Melton?

 

I give up. Poor new drivers today have so much “advice” offered them and maybe half is good or decent, the rest? Oh dear. It’s no wonder there are so many drivers that start off on the wrong foot. They ask for advice from experienced drivers and still they get numbers from all over the map.

I guess take all the advice, add it all up, then divide from the advice count to hopefully get a useful “average”

 

I had a line haul run for CF pulling trains over Gov. Camp with no jake, during the Summer in late afternoon. Easy off the top. As I recollect about 5th and 10 psi application. I'm still here so I must of done something right.

 

I hear you and to a point agree. In general I will open up a thread and see some really outlandishly ignorant stuff sometimes. Most of it is harmless hyperbole and I ignore it. In this case I am with in TOTAL agreement with post #37. I'm old school and I freely admit it. This is why I did not offer advice with my first post only to say get in a truck with a "jake". On this subject but an aside. Forget about me, in fact I won't get offended if anybody does ignore me. However there are 6 or 7 old schoolers in these boards. You can tell they are who they say they are after a hundred plus comments. When one of these people makes a comment about how to properly do something like a down hill without a "jake" I highly recommend you heed their advice. Most of the time said advice come at the school of hard knocks. God only knows how many times I had to learn at that school!

 

True. When I learned, there was no school. No Internet forums. I grew up on a farm and could back a hay trailer when I was 12. At 18, my apprentice phase was 2 days with the senior driver showing me about 20 stops on a West Texas load. Many years later as I ventured out west, I went down a grade heavy a bit too fast ONE time. And I’ve made other mistakes but I learned from them.

But with the huge network that today’s Internet forums can offer anyone, you’d think that could only be a good thing for those looking to tap into many hundreds of combined years of experience and wisdom. But I’m not so sure.

Yes. There’s more than one way to safely go down a significant steep grade and survive. But then there’s the matter of hardening brake pads to the point of significant reduction in braking ability and shortening their lifespan greatly. They’re not my brakes (company driver) but at some point, my life may depend on them working 100% effectively in a emergency stop scenario.