The journey begins - purchased a truck.

Nice truck -- looking forward to following your adventure!

You might give Con-Way Truckload a call or three to see if you can get a copy of their maintenance records. They might be useful when diagnosing future issues & it might help come resale time too. And if they sold it in 2013, I find the 1 older driver story plausible -- otherwise it should have been sold off sooner (they're much more likely to trade out a truck if it becomes unassigned). And younger guys probably would have done more than 80,000 miles/year.


Have you pulled flatbed before?

 

Congratulations Blair !

 

Sounds like a solid drive train but probably be looking at an inframe soon. Be nice to it and you might get a couple years yet. But at that price you'll still be in good shape and have a good solid pre emissions truck. One thing I didn't see mentioned was the suspension. Any idea what kind of shape that's in?
73% is kinda steep for your own trailer imo. 65% to pull theirs is even worse tho.

 

Id highly recommend the FS2500. My buddy has had one for years and is at 300k miles on his current oil.

 

wait a minute, can I nab up a $2k van that will barely pass an inspection, get the extra 7% and go right back to drop and hook freight?

 

FWIW, it doesn't have to be a 10 year old Freightliner to rattle and sound like everything above your head is coming down. On my way up to pick up my 2015 KW I was asked to recover a broke down 2014 Freightliner from a dealership in Illinois where they had it tore apart for 2 weeks. I got 99.4 miles down the road before it failed with the exact same problem again. I ran it almost 3000 miles with the engine de-rating multiple times a day but that wasn't the worst, the truck had less than 100k miles on it and every bump it sounded like the cabinets were coming down behind me. I have NEVER been in a truck of any age that had so many places and things rattling and banging. Nothing out of the ordinary in this truck, the driver who had it ran a semi dedicated run pulling a conestoga and had not made any changes to anything inside the cab/sleeper. I asked him about it a week later when I ran into him at the terminal and he said it was like that from the day it was brand new and his brand new 2015 was just as bad.

 

Congratulations I am definitely tuned in.

 

Good luck and all the best on your new ADVENTURE , your T2000 cleaned up pretty nice

 

The thing is those percentages are probably better than most independents do getting 100% of whatever they get. And as long as they're not working with a shyster agent manipulating the system to skim they know what the real 100% pay on the load is instead of like us guys who run brokered that hardly ever know. You might be surprised at the times running brokered that you were only getting 65% of the take anyways on some loads. Not every load of course but it does happen especially on loads with customer checkbook opened up where you are asked what you need then the broker juices it up a lot more for whatever cut they themselves need - the kind of load where everyone is trying to pay for their kid's college on that one load as brokers are fond to say lol.

 

I've seen some BCO's where I'm at (on my lanes) do exactly that although their own equipment was very nice not junky. It is the best of both worlds. More often than not the last minute live loads that have to rush thru should be paying much better. But in a scenario where a lucrative drop/hook presented its self you can take advantage of it. This after having figured out some good lanes and being on good terms with some agents - something only acquired over time with effort, rather than just starting out and figuring to do it no problem right from the get go - and it would take some thinking to pull off right.