They put those brake check pull off's there for a reason.

It’s kind of pointless as they always work until they don’t. If you keep them adjusted you shouldn’t have a problem. I have gotten under mine and checked them a couple of times but that’s rare. When I drove for the last 3 companies the drivers weren’t allowed to adjust the brakes, It had to be a mechanic.

 

I adjust mine at home, and I don't put on enough miles between trips to bother on the road. And when I'm out, I'm always poking around and under the truck looking at stuff.

 

Exactly. If you are under greasing it you should be checking the brakes then. And you should be greasing it. Saying that, if I could cost effectively switch to disc brakes all the way around I would in a heartbeat.

 

That’s actually part of my old guy bias against automatic slacks. I don’t think we’re under our trucks enough any more. When I was under there adjusting my brakes all the time I found and fixed a lot of stuff before someone at a scale pointed it out to me. You as an O/O, it sounds like you have figured out that there’s money to be found laying around under your truck. It stands to reason that the older the truck the more money you’re going to find under it. Even something simple or stupid, if it’s run until it fails there could be collateral damage and now you’re looking at 2, 3 or 4 repairs instead of 1 preventative one. That can add up, especially if it happens in shops over the road somewhere. Or worse, the mobile service guy at a scale. There’s a lot of company drivers don’t have that financial incentive or the interest level to get under there and look around. Not that they would know what they were looking at anyway. With the number of pretrips I see being done from the left seat these days i look at those trucks and have to wonder when the last time someone was under it to find what fell off already, let alone something that might.

 

I guess that’s one way to get the slack out of something. Just not sure how much that improves brake performance.

 

Anyone that gets in trouble on Donner probably shouldn’t be steering a truck to start with. That pass isn’t bad at all. I heard ALL about it for quite a while before I ever saw it. After a few years of driving up and down 12 to 16% grades in a 290hp truck with no Jake, Donner was a bit of a let down to be honest. Couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. Same as Siskiyous. I don’t care what the weather is doing, the day comes I need tire chains to get up that ####ing thing with a 5 axle truck I’ll quit. We have lots of stuff up here makes Donner look like a ramp at a skateboard park. Salmo-Creston is a good one to test your brake discipline on. West side of that down into Salmo is the longest unbroken mountain grade on a highway in N.America. I’ve had lots of motorhomes and Billy Big Rig Dodge Cummins types fly by me with everything on fire on that one. Anarchist is another beauty, 8-1/2 miles from the Brake Check down into Osoyoos, it takes 20 minutes to a half hour to get down off it with a b-train. There’s a retaining wall on one of the switchbacks part way down that I swear has smears of every colour of automotive paint known to man on it. Always amazed me the disrespect for brake checks I saw down there. That’s something we didn’t really see up here until relatively recently, but it’s getting worse every day. You are 100% right. Those crashes and runaways are driver error, not any kind of mechanical failure. Some it could be argued were murder-suicides and no kind of error at all.