The Truckers’ Report flatbed Hall of Shame.

If that’s how they do it, it’s probably stronger than a conventional van trailer. They ain’t made out of much you know

 

I've never pulled a dry van, only reefers. But honestly I don't see how you would use a load lock with the flimsy dry van walls. Maybe they don't and just use the e-tracks or whatever they are called?.

 

You put them up, but they don’t stay and they certainly don’t hold back much. Logistic bars(e track) does a decent job.

 

Only way to get load locks to work in a dry van,is to use your winch bar and bow the sides out 8".

 

I can’t remember if they went up the sides or if they just tied into the pipe along the bottom edge. I never pulled one and my old boss was phasing them out when I started. I only remember about every-other winch or maybe every third winch had to be used for the sides. I wish I could find a pic of one closed up. They seems like kind of a pain, that’s probably why in the pic I posted the truck was running down the road with the sides up. He might not have been going too far. The ones my old boss had hauled wood chips from Seeley Lake MT to Lewiston ID and then brought lumber back. The guys that pulled them loved how well they could tie a lumber load down with the hookless straps using opposing winches.

 

Just keep going until the bar punches through the walls. Just as good as the e-track bars and you can put it literally anywhere you want. Don't have to stick to only where the tracks are.

 

Until you loosen the straps, then it all comes crashing down.

 

One thing I'm going to do in my personal dry van is concealed D rings around the edges that sit flush with the floor when not in use. And not placed where a pallet jack would snag. Never liked the load lock bars, and not a huge fan of E tracks. I've never like the idea of using the walls of a dry van to hold the load in. All the walls are for in a dry van is to keep the wind and weather off the load and give you terrible fuel mileage.

 

Because vans are a semi-monocoque structure, adding E-track bars actually slightly strengthens the trailer by reducing lateral deflection of the van walls. The more planar the walls, the stronger they are.
Those loads you see flexing the walls of a van outward can actually substantially reduce the strength of the structure.

And curtainsides are heavy because they need the deck to carry more of the structural load than in a van. The curtains can add some stiffness when tensioned, but not like the metal (or FRP) wall of a van.

Insomnia, one hell of a drug!

 

Might not be popular but I’m going to chime in. I ran for a company called Stylecrest out if Fremont Ohio. Had two divisions hauling our own products I was mainly on the dry van side running 48’ and 53’ lift gate boxes. However I’d get dispatched to haul for our “exterior cladding” division every few weeks. That division started out running traditional curtain sides requiring straps like a traditional open deck flatbed. The company purchased used trailers from a now defunct company called Lexington Cartage. Those trailers LOOKED just like a traditional curtain side at first glance but as others have said there was more than meets the eye. There were center uprights down the centerline nose to tail and about 3’ on center. The curtains had some sort of webbing embedded in them and there was no need to secure the freight inside once the curtains were hooked and winched down. Had to watch a video about how to secure curtains and such but we ran them for several years that way. They were specifically purchased as our runs with the external cladding (think bunks of vinyl siding) were multi drop affairs with up to 10-12 stops on one trailer and doing away with the unsecuring/resecuring was the main reason for those specialized Curtain trailers. Our runs with that many stops were generally 2-3 day affairs so saving that securement time over 10, 15, or 20 stops was significant