First tanker job

Ok.

The OP ought to just ignore my posts on this thread then.

 

you aren't driving a truck anymore with a tanker, you're using the walls of a tanker trailer to gently move a mass of liquid around that weighs more than the truck and trailer combined.

Truck 20,000 lbs
Empty tanker 15,000 lbs
Liquid product with a good 40 feet of free travel from the front wall to the back wall...45,000 lbs.

It's like an ant carrying around a half full 20oz soda bottle

the liquid will do what you ask it to do, slowly, if you ask nicely it will come along cheerfully, it will even help you drive better if you're gentle enough. if you don't ask nicely, or you change your mind, or you ask too quick, the liquid will just kill you without a thought

best tip I could offer anybody learning to drive tankers is the use of what i call velocity pressure, positive or negative. if you ever seen a hockey player dribble a puck, left right left right to keep control of it, you basically do the same thing with the throttle and deceleration, forward and backward, but infinitesimally slow, while rolling.

if u r gently accelerating, increasing velocity, however slight, the liquid will push against the back wall and stay there... even a feather touch of acceleration will keep it back there in one spot, it can no longer move side to side, as long as there is some amount of positive acceleration force.

Same for negative pressure... if you're on the brake gently reducing velocity, or when let off the throttle pressure to allow natural deceleration to occur, the liquid will begin to consolidate against the front wall and stay there, even just letting off the throttle is enough to consolidate the whole load in one spot inside the tank against the front wall, above the drives. If you use brake pressure, you can keep the product pinned against the front wall, with barely any braking pressure at all.

if i'm turning and it's a long sweeper with nobody around, i want the liquid to stay at the back through the turn...I brake way more than I need to going into the turn, so i can gently accelerate through the whole turn without letting the product come off the back wall. there's zero product movement, zero stress, it all stays in one spot.

if i'm in turny roads surrounded by other traffic, and i have to keep slowing down and speeding up a lot, braking with liquid becomes a two stage deal.

Stage 1 is very slight brake pressure, just enough to put the product against the front wall and hold it there. Once you feel the product settle up against the front wall, stage 2 is to then add however much extra brake pressure you need to actually slow the product down.

You don't really have to brake in two stages, but if you don't do it in two stages, sergio will go ahead and do stage two by himself without really asking for anybody's opinion first.

Problem is if you forgot about sergio and happen to be in a turn, or worst case scenario, you're already in a turn, and then you have to stop real fast, when sergio kicks you in the back of the head with forty five thousand pounds of retard strength, it will be at an angle. Truck and trailer will be thinking it's going into a turn, and sergio , inside the tank, not wearing a gdmn seatbelt, having not been considered, will still be going in a straight line, because you hadn't asked sergio to do anything else yet. so sergio in that case won't have any choice but to take everything with him...in a straight line. WHEELS UP.

i don't even think of it as driving a truck anymore, i see it as using a truck to escort a huge heavy blob of juice, that likes to move all around

 

A good write up.

Sometimes the environment can get in the way.

Titanium Dioxide slurry, a white pigment mixed with water. Weight 22.5 pounds per gal. and 2250 gal [in an old 5000gal 'tight fill' latex trailer wasn't all that bad till you caught stop and go traffic on the BQE and you feel like Indiana Jones trying to outrun that boulder in the first flick.

That Jiggle I mentioned was a light product, thinner than water, in a tall skin tank.
It is like driving around pulling a bowl of Jell-O as you feel it moving around seeming to push one way, then the other, just twitching [maybe twerking] away and you need to keep driving down the road without any attempt to counter steer what you feel. You can't 'fight' it..

 

we’ve talked about that I believe….

there was a place in northeast Ohio that I loaded that stuff at….. it wasn’t a comfortable feeling driving in the snow with that load…..and I had a 7000 gallon trailer

 

Yeah that would roll around.

 

Chemicals. Expand.
Home every day? Couple of nights out a week? OTR?
Is it chemical, or chemicals? Hauling industrial bleach one day, caustic soda the next?
If the company is bigger than a handful of trucks, they should have trailers dedicated to each chemical they haul.

Or maybe you'll be hauling DEF.

(Doesn't count)

 

that's dense AF, i didn't know liquid could get that dense. heaviest stuff i ever pulled was like 12 lbs/gallon, some brown juice from Wausau WI that went into bricks in Connecticut to make them red. I'd much rather have one dense product though than have a 3 or 4 compartment trailer for three days, there is literally no way to pull a compartment trailer without getting jerked around, even in a straight line, they all start oscillating with each other no matter how smooth you drive. pretty annoying. anybody figured out how to fast travel back to the tank wash?

 

Don't forget to open the top hatch,,,happens fast,,

 

You had to 'sparge' the railcar with air before transfering, The standpipe [dip leg] had a 'T' at the bottom and two perforated lines running towards each end on the bottom to stir it up in suspension, the whole railcar would shake. It was very concentrated; spill a teacup and it took a good 15 min with a hose to get rid of it..

Acids are heavy too, Sulfuric is over 15 #/gal.

 

Many sucked in tankwagons can be re-built. The only one I was close to was back in a few months, looking shiny and brand new.

The old wash rack break room yarn was Two Chem Leaman wagons on their first run, dropped at a paper mill in Maine for the customer to pump off and after sucking in the first one, they hooked onto the other and sucked it in too!

I doubt that one is true; I know they were over built and trailers were destroyed [happend when you own over 2000 of anything] and I never heard of it while I was wearing a blue windbreaker.

Gerard's vacuum vent, especially when Matlack slapped the christmas tree and vacuum on the dome lids and it was widely copied, kinda diminished the chances of pulling a full vacuum.

Now the Vacuum loading dry bulker, with the weak vacum relief, was just the exact inlet size as the base of a 'to go' coffee cup...