Slamming the tandem stop when sliding trailer

Hooking up to a heavy trailer I tend to tap the king pin a little rough sometimes.
Other days it's as smooth as butter and you can hear the latch clink gently closed.

The dt12 in the freightliners are good 95% of the time but that 5% ...BANG "well I guess it's ####ing hooked now ain't it"

 

I've left skid marks from the trailer before.

You have to get on the fuel to get it going, especially when there is a big weight differential, then the transmission doesn't want to stop even after you're on the brakes.

 

I’ll see your rookie mistake and raise you an experienced driver making a mistake by being complacent.
I was pulling a stretch rgn that extend from 48’ to 68’ to load longer tall cargo.
The night before I checked to make sure the trailer would open and close at the port the next morning. All went well and I flipped the air switch to lock and went to bed. The next morning I’m pulling into the port 100 miles away and it is just starting to get light out. That’s when I noticed my trailer had grown about 15 feet because while I turned the air switch to lock the pins, I didn’t visually verify that they actually locked. That will get your attention.

I bet that’s mostly what it is. My old eaton auto shift sucked at backing smoothly.

 

It's 100% certain that the Stevens driver cranks the panding gear down and then another 500 turns so his trailer can be a ski jump. EVERY new driver leaves the landing gear too high. If the landing gear feet are touching the ground before you separate the truck and trailer YOU ARE LEAVING IT TOO HIGH>

 

Not necessarily because I crank it all the way down to the ground to; once the the hissing starts, then that leaves the trailer at just the right height, so the next driver don't even have to dump the air to get under it. When drivers do what you described, that's when the keep cranking, then the next driver tries to get under it and the kingpin goes right over the 5th wheel. Makes me wanna curse the whole human race. I did, however, go to get a preload once, and the trailer was so low I couldn't get under it. I managed to flag down a yard dog to elevate it for me. The previous driver must've left the landing gear 2 feet off the ground I swear lol

 

If the landing gear are touching the ground before you separate you are leaving the gear too high. After you drop the trailer the air bags on the trailer continue to deflate and this causes the nose of the trailer to go up. The dufus dropping the trailer will never know he screwed the next driver because he is gone. Until your job is to pick up those dropped trailers from OTR drivers you will likely never notice how big this problem is. I didn't until I was the driver picking up those trailers. We had drivers injured monthly due to high trailers. Every time we got new OTR drivers working with us picking up the OTR trailers we witnessed EVERY one of them doing this. EVERY one of them would argue, because they never stuck around to see the next driver hooking to their trailer. Once you had them back under a trailer dropped as they dropped it and then back under the trailer dropped as I described they understood the problem. They never admitted they were doing it wrong but they switched to our way of doing things.

 

Reading through all of this it’s obvious none of you pull tankers!
Slamming king pins and worse, not getting under the trailer straight bends and jams the landing gear. You can always tell the new drivers are who come off of vans! Luckily there are no tandems to slide!

 

Truth!

In my home yard, dad's size 12 boot up your ### would be all the motivation required to be gentle on equipment.