Let it ride?

I wouldn't even worry about it.

You can get away with quite a bit more than that on steers.

 

Hammer down

 

I'd be running at 1/4 tank fuel and have no problem running cross country with that weight, and top off my fuel whenever I felt like it. Even if you later add another 1,000 lbs of fuel, it will probably be split about 50/50, and I still would not worry about it. 12,600 on steers is where I begin to worry at a handful of locations, as long as the others are within reasonable tolerance levels

 

My steer tires are always over. Usually around 12,300 with a full tank.
Never a problem.

I set it that way to give a little more room for the drives and tandems.

 

Your good, if you are going to take on fuel I suggest moving your tandems forward some. You have 4000 pounds to give on your trailer tandems.

 

When you do get right at 34k on the drives and full of fuel, that's when you need to look at your steer weight and make sure it's near or under 12,500. But understand, that if you pull a van or reefer, moving the 5th wheel back will worsen your MPG. The closer you can keep the nose of the trailer to the back of the cab, the better your fuel economy will be. This may or may not be a concern for you. If you have fuel bonuses at your company, you can bet a 5th wheel set too far back [to keep weight off the steers] will affect your MPG numbers, quarter after quarter, for the worse. A notch or two further back then necessary, could potentially cost you .5-1 CPM fuel bonus at many outfits.

 

That steer weight is nothing to be concerned about, if I was in CA I would be alarmed though, but not for long. Diesel fuel weighs roughly 7 pounds per gallon and how much of it will you burn to travel 120 miles if you are averaging say 6.5 MPG? Doing the math in my head says that you will only be about 30 pounds over on the steers if you get scaled.

I did get an overweight ticket in Georgia and the leeway they were going to give me was 2000 pounds on the spread axle. My weight on that axle was 22000 and I ended up getting a fine for something like $58. The legal weight was 20K per axle on an eight foot spread.

 

No reason you can't avoid overweight tickets AND optimize your fuel economy. It's not a one or the other thing. Point is to find the 5th wheel "sweet spot", and leave it there.

You will probably find that most new OTR fleet trucks are engineered and built to where you could run the 5th wheel all the way up to the end of the slide, and you should be under 12,500 at max fuel and 34k drives and APU. And they do this with fuel economy in mind.

 

How much do you think the mpg difference is with the 5th wheel all the way back and forward?