My first dump truck! advice please?

I havent tried it with this new aluminum can im driving, but with an old steel body mack I drove the gate wouldnt open with weight against it, it was just a regular gate with an air latch, I hit the air gate button one day and it didnt open (I didnt pull on it hard enough) and i slung the bed up in the air and whaddaya know it wouldnt open for the life of me with that weight against it, I got the bed down and wala it opened fine. It seemed those old steel bodys I was running were all like that. I dont know if maybe because they had been so jerry rigged they didnt have a strong enough arm on the latch?

you've gotta understand these were OLD trucks, I drove either an 82, 86 or 77 R model mack, dumping 50+ loads a day of stock onto various stock piles intra plant at a limestone mine, It very well may have just been due to the fact the trucks were in such poor shape.

 

Maybe. I ran an aluminum bed truck, and would often have to do exactly that when we spread ABC mix or processed fill. That's what the chains are on the back of the gate for - to limit how much it can open for times when you're spreading ABC, dumping asphalt into a shuttle buggy, etc.
Of course, you had to be careful not to put the bed all the way up before opening the gate, or you were liable to lift the front end off the ground when you pulled forward to spread it. If you've ever had to do that with a cabover dump (a twin steer cabover dump was one of several trucks I drove when I was in South Africa), you had to be especially careful about that.

 

Thats a nice older mack, How much weight can you gross with the quad axle? Here in PA I run a tri-axle, western star, aluminum bed, I just started back to dumps this weeks, so far so good, hauled some stock, doing some coal here next week.

BTW asphalt sucks, I have no desire to ever mess with that stinky, sticky, hurry up and wait bullcrap, I would much rather just hurry up, lol.

 

I'm pretty sure you can haul more in PA on a tri axle than we could in NC on a quint. I could carry 18 tons of product on that on the Interstate, and 20 tons on secondary roads. That truck is a 98 RD688S, E7 427, 8LL, 4.17s.

And I love asphalt! Even now, whenever I smell some hot mix being put down, my eyes widen and my nostrils flare. Man, I miss doing sitework.
Asphalt isn't a big deal. Spray a little diesel in the bed a couple times a day, and it doesn't stick. The only mix I've ever had a problem with was UHMA Special Type B... that stuff was the devil... and you had to be diligent about maintaining your bed when hauling PADL 78.

 

You can use plain old vegetable oil instead of diesel to keep the hot mix from sticking.....

 

If you have an air gate...there will be rams attached from the dump-body to the gate....

 

I've heard the same with peanut oil. But peanut oil is considerably more expensive than diesel fuel. Don't know how much vegetable oil costs.
If the asphalt plant actually has their soap and water mix set up right, there's no need to use diesel at all, unless you have a spreader on the back of your dump body. However, most have a tendency to excessively dilute it.

 

No rams.......So you don't have a high lift gate.....I didn't see air locks either....So you might have to unlock your gate manually......

 

The high lift gates.. we had a few contractors who had them, but I never saw much point in them. If you just had to dump a pile straight onto the ground, they were fine, but you couldn't dump into a paver or shuttle buggy like that.

 

I can gross 75280 with a tri-axle, that can get me around 21 to 23 tons depending on how the loader operator feels, alot of sites seem to have scales, some of these strip mines the loader doesnt even have scales, but I can get a rough estimate with the reading on the air pressure in my bags, right around 90ish psi with the tag axle up gets me to atleast 73k.