Question about recaps

Its usually not you or the company, it's the customer, and loads that determine your schedule. It doesn't matter how hard you run, Load and unload times will set your pace more than anything.

 

The shipper and reciever decides how you are going to run. No one else, not you not your company etc. All they can do is make promises to these shippers and recievers which now you are bound to keep.

Burn out your 70, get the 34 done and move out. It's faster than trying to roll slow 7 days. Make your miles and get it done with for the week. Every 5th or 6th day you will be resting 34.

The other thing about loading and unloading, its a form of parasite against your earning potential each week. Stick to drop and hook, like medicine (Which is unloaded and reloaded within the hour or half that) Leave the grocery and abusive lumbers behind. You have no value to these customers. We lost three days at Americold (80 total hours waiting on the load, for a married team... a really big waste in 2001 for about a 1200 mile haul.) in Salinas. The refill of fuel in everything pretty much wipes out whatever profit FFE would have made that trip. (Along with paying us very little)

We started looking to haul medicine out of Memphis after that fiasco.

 

Unless you are dedicated or home weekly you generally will sometimes have to run on recaps and other times be able to do a 34. Most of the time I am able to get a 34 in every other week. Sometimes it happens every week but there have been times I will do a full 25 days out and not do a 34 the entire time. Just depends on what the freight is doing.

 

Depends on the loads.
Some weeks it's better to run hard for a few days and reset. Some weeks it's better to recap. There really is no set answer.

 

I never ran recaps on my tractors, pulling those confounded RR wagons with recaps was bad enough,,,what? Oh, recap,,,,,never mind,,

 

I seldom do a 34. Maybe 3-4 per year.

I plan my loads so I can run recap hours as long as I want. Most loads have enough time to do this, some are tighter and longer. But I can usually adjust the next one to make up for it.

I hate taking a 34, so I choose not to. In over 8 years with this company no one has ever said that I needed to change how I run my loads.

 

Back when I was running OTR I would do a reset when I ran out of clean underwear and socks

 

Doing flatbed i find myself doing more 34s than recap but it all depends when ur picking up and delivering... Every load is different and takes a different way to manage your logbook..but me personally i dont like to run on recaps more than 2 weeks because i get burned out working everyday.i like to get a weekend off every once in awhile it makes me feel more like a human being rather than a monkey who presses the fuel pedal and turns a steering wheel

 

What the other drivers said. I've ran a recap for weeks at a time. The idea is to watch how you log, and keep an eye on 12 midnight. What always forces me to run recap is deliveries on the weekend. I always try to run at minimum 8 hrs per day. Then you'll at the very least have a full drive clock