Pneumatic pros and cons

They carry 15 psi rated, I usually unload at 12 psi and line at 11. Conservatively.

Its enough that if you undid enough bolts up top hatch it will kill you before your body lands 150 feet or more downrange and make a unholy mess of everything 200 feet radius.

at sea level there is already a certain atmosphere pressure on one inch of your skin. We take that to 15 psi more.

with the correct bulk training like I recieved in the late 80's I can touch and unload any cement tanker today within the hour. Its not that hard.

 

I don't know the failure point. The bad weld would be where a tanker might fail. Or your sharp metal hammer. It will simply unzip. And bomb. You wont have much time to understand the situation.

Then again going to work in the morning or anything else in life is a risk anyway. Bulk tanking is not dangerous to you provided you remember certain things. Like never go on top of a tanker that has air in it., It literally does not have anything for you to do up there but die. You follow me?

Tanking is FUN. They put a dallop of ash or cement into your tank, slam hatch, bolt. Sign paper go to plant. Unload repeat. When your logs say quit you go home. Do it again tomorrow.

 

Once you get familiar, you can run at a lower pressure and sit in your cab if you want. Although I don't advise this (things can happen quick), I prefer to "babysit" my gauges to stay at the highest pressure I know I can get away with and not plug up or damage the customers system. Yeah, I do crosswords on my phone while I unload but my eyes glance at the gauges every 15-30 seconds so I can make my adjustments and keep her humming (faster unload times). BTW, I haul cement and fly ash 99% of the time. Every once in a while granulated lime.

 

Indeed. And mr hose and ears open for Mr Cough.

If Mr Hose is snaking around hard it's all good. If it quits moving, Mr Cough is coming and you have a crisis on your hands as the product seals the pipe.

Dumping tank air is your most important moment when its empty. Make sure no souls are near that pipe exit on the other side.

 

If it were that simple, they would hire door swingers to do it. Figuring out how to empty a trailer is an entirely different ball game to figuring out why you're doing everything right, but the product isn't moving, especially if it's a product you aren't used to.

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To the TC, pnuematics are something that requires a lot of patience to learn how to do, and a lot of practice to learn how to do well. I loved running them, it is really rewarding work if you enjoy being alone and problem solving. It can also get pretty boring if you don't like routine and consistent runs (I was lucky the company I ran with had a lot of different products and customers all over northern North America).

Once you know what you're doing, you'll be able to hear when something changes. Depending on what you're pushing, you will have anywhere from 10-30 minutes per hopper to stand around and do nothing.

 

Indeed if it were that simple.

One of the things I enjoy doing once in a while is take a complicated situation and reduce it to simple sentance or two. A few words even if possible.

Now if I can tease myself and reduce the word count....

 

When was the last time you pulled one? Because I pulled some earlier this year, and could unload 29.5 ton of pebbled limestone in 55-60 minutes. But if I messed one little thing up, it was an instant clog and 15-20 minutes of work to fix.

There's simplifying something to make it easily understandable, and then there's dumbing something down to the point where the person reading it doesn't really get any useful information from it.