Split Axle Weight on a 5 Axle?.... Why?

That's ridiculous. The whole point of a tandem axle is they are weighed together.

 

Not sure how they can give a ticket because you're over 17k on an axle when legally you can go 20k on a single axle. Sounds like trucker tales....

 

20K is only on a single axle, 10' or more apart from the nearest axle. So, a close tandem, 50"-55" space would be 17K max.

 

Yeah true but if they're a closed tandem, that's 34k together. To weigh each one individually defeats the purpose of the tandem rating. One could be 18k and the other 16k but they'd still be 34k.

I don't think you'd find many cases of them being THAT lopsided though.

 

The only time I could see that being an issue is if you were running a single tire on a dual set due to a blowout and they wanted to test to see if you were overloading the single tire.

 

I thought most of those Melton flats were that way, they can run shortened (cali. legal) or spread.

 

The funny part about that is that we have been running our new 3 axle setup (S/A tractor and S/A trailer) for about a month now, and we are usually pushing 20,000 on either the drive or trailer, obviously legal to 20,000, but I was curious if it would get us pulled in more often, but so far, not so much.

Just seems odd that they would nitpick about a small difference between tandems and 20,000 on a single slides right though, just seems funny.

 

By the federal definition a tandem group is two axles more than 40" but less than 96" apart. No mention of 17k per axle. I know states can come up with screwy ways to get money but I don't see how getting a ticket for being 17500 on one axle and 16500 on the other would stick.

But when I was running maxi flat we were good for 104500 everywhere but OR. They bridged us out at 102k for some reason.

 

Rollup on the eastbound I-16 scales west of Savannah with your 16k and 18k and watch what happens, you'll be sitting there with an axle overweight ticket at the least and a bridge ticket at worst but either way you will be there till EACH axle is legal. A closed tandem is still two separate axles and the limit is per axle based on the grouping distance.

 

You just saw a driver scaling out a spread axle trailer, if the cashier doesn't know how to do it, it can take a while, same if the driver doesn't know.