My brakes are smoking when on steep grades.

use the engine brake . you should be able to get down grapevine with just the engine brake on medium level in the correct gear. what truck do you have, and which engine?

 

let’s hope it’s not welded now.

 

Right; don't set the trailer brakes until they've cooled off.

 

ok my last experience with a freightliner auto trans is the engine brake is on the right stalk. and you can switch it into manual mode. what you want to do at the top of grapevine is use the brakes to get down to 30-35 mph . find whatever gear where 35mph is at about 1500+ rpms and set the jake on medium. if you start gaining more than 5mph you can switch it to high on the jake.. if you are still gaining speed on high. use the brakes to slow down to about 1300 rpms and then downshift to the next lowest gear and repeat the process... use this technique and you can get down any mountain on the interstates safely.

 

not a problem. is your truck able to shift into manual mode ? or did the company disable that? that looks fairly similar to the 16 freightliner i drove. if i remeber, to activate the engine brake you have to pull down on the stalk but i dont remember 100%

 

Even if you're not allowed to switch to manual, like with Schneider, you can still use engine braking to descend hills, at least on the Cascadia with the DT12. You might can just set the cruise to 35 and let it do its own engine braking if it has the adaptive cruise. Or, I've found setting the engine brake to high will hold the gear, unless the RPM goes too high for the engine. Even in automatic mode, I can still force a downshift as long as the rpm wouldn't go too high.