Minimum Weight to scale.

30,000 if I am hooking a unit to a sealed trailer, 35,000 if I can see the freight. I am usually more concerned about over axle.

 

PowederBlue got it right. I haven't had to weigh anything in over eight months. I became an expert on this when I got a overweight ticket in the first 20 minutes of my first run lol. 34k is the key, since on most van trucks the axle weight is 34,000, so if your whole load weighs that much, that weight can be anywhere (front, middle, back) and be legal.

 

If I'm taking a usual, regular customer load from one of our dedicated runs, I never scale because they are good about loading way under 40K, usually closer to 30K.

If I'm taking a broker load or ANY load that was loaded by Mexicans in Laredo, I scale every time. One time in Laredo they had me 2K over gross and 3500 over on my drives. Took the scale ticket back and they guy who loaded me saw me coming and just started saying, "I know, I know"...So I asked him why did he even do it then? He just shrugged his shoulders and told me which dock to bump so he could take a skid off and reconfigure the load. Dispatch at my company got me 4 hours of detention for having to deal with it.

 

I'm confused...are you saying if your load is under 34K you can't be overweight on an axle?

 

Close, but you need to add the mt weight in. So if your drives are 15k with mt trailer, you certainly cannot put whole 34k on them.

 

If the weight on the BOL is correct and it is less than 34,000 then there is no way you should be over axle no matter how they load it. I weighed sealed containers I picked up if they were 30,000 or more because sometimes the bills were off a bit.

 

. You might want to rethink it. I've picked up loads that were 26k but I was 1600 over on the drives. Good luck

 

It will depend on the load and it's placement in the trailer or on the bed. If you have a rookie forklift driver double stacking heavy pallets up front you are going to have problems.

When in doubt, scale it out...

... and remember who "gets" to pay the fine if you are over weight on any axle, let alone who "gets" to have points added to their DAC...

Most companies reimburse scale fees, it takes all of 10-30 minutes to complete scaling, time well spent.

 

I load 25+ tons each and every trip to get as close as possible to the maximum gross weight that I'll be paid for. I only "scale" a load if I will have to cross a scale. Ain't a scale been built that you can't route yourself around if you need to, though, so it's pretty rare when I actually pay to weigh my truck. For the most part, I get it "close" using my air gauges, and where I run that's really as precise as it needs to be.

 

Good point. I imported a container that showed 26,550 lbs. The only problem was it shouldn't have been lbs, it was Kgs. Overweight, had to pay for the trucking company to pull permits to pull it into a warehouse and break it down.