maximum weight per axle?

It seems to me the driver gets a smoother ride with more weight on the tractor. I prefer having more weight on my drives than on my tandems for this reason. Ride matters.

 

To be fair, that student is most likely going to go to a very large to mega trucking company. The vast majority of those fleets are spec'ed at a 12k axle.

 

So I guess it's fine for their teachers to just tell them the max legal limit is 12K and leave it at that, in the same way that it's fine for an elementary school teacher to teach students the following method of simplifying fractions:

 

I don't think that was the point. When a 5th wheel is disabled and can not be slid it becomes somewhat difficult to go much past 12K on the steers and stay legal on the drives. While not a legal limit because of the way the carrier has set the tractor it becomes somewhat of a limit nonetheless.

 

This topic actually just jogged my memory a bit. I remember a thread about steer weight limits in either the latter part of 2015 or early 2016. I think dog locked it. It got a bit intense. I forgot the numbers but a driver was having an issue with his steers and no matter what he done could not get the load legal. The conversation got really nasty. That evening I sent the OP a PM and asked him about his 5th wheel and if he could slid it. He said no. I told him to ignore the thread and go get the load reworked. The next day he told me the shipper installed a bulkhead and got it legal thanked me and to be honest I have not seen that driver post anymore since. Sometime when you give advice it is important to remember these green drivers are not supertruckers and are working in most cases for a mega. Some of these guys are so green they have to get help putting on chains in the winter. (been there done that)

 

All I'm saying is unless there is some compelling reason to misstate things, they should be explained accurately. (Maybe if my folks told me babies come from a stork I'd feel differently about the subject. They didn't, so I don't.)

The reason I think all of this is important is because I recently didn't have my facts straight on the subject. I found it very annoying to discover too, because not having your facts straight puts you at a disadvantage when you're discussing things with company management.

 

This I can agree with fully. It is interesting you bring up this topic this way too. Yes if you are going to come from a position of knowledge on ANY topic YOU MUST be able to defend your position. This is interesting because one of my cousins is working on her PhD defense. She is about to drive her father into the bat belfry. I linked that term because I really did not want to get much into what it this is.