Under 26000# with air brakes

There’s absolutely a difference between air and hydraulic.
The biggest difference is you can actually run out of air pressure with to frequent brake application.
You can not run out of hydraulic pressure no matter how many times you apply the brakes.
Now you can boil the brake fluid by over heating the brakes but that’s whole another issue.

 

In theory, yes. In practice, you'd basically have to try to do that. No way you are going to run out of air in an air brake system just by using the brakes on a hill.

 

The point is most drivers don't run out of air descending a mountain because the have had at least some basic training on air brake systems and they know how to conserve there air pressure.
Now let's send the untrained sixteen year old down Fancy Gap with a loaded truck at 26,000# with zero air brake training and see what happens.

 

Run out of air on a downhill? You would have to be fanning your brakes CONSTANTLY to do this which would still be far more likely to cause brake fade than consuming air faster than the compressor could build pressure; and the hydraulic brakes would be susceptible to the same brake fade if driven that way.

The only difference is you can make more air if a leak develops, you cannot make more brake fluid if a leak develops.

I would much prefer an ignorant driver have air brakes.

 

In all the discussions I've heard or read regarding proper braking downhill, (and I've heard people for and against virtually every possible method of braking down a hill) I've never heard conservation of air enter into the picture. In order to bleed off enough air to matter you have to pump the brakes, and this involves hitting the brakes hard enough to lock up your wheels on the grade.

No, there is no skill needed in bringing an air brake vehicle down a hill, and if someone brand new is going to have trouble on the hill it will be with brake fade and not the air part of the system. Juice brakes suffer in the same way from brake fade, so no, I don't see the problem.

 

What piece of crap machinery have you used that you have to worry about air pressure fading? The only way that can happen is if there is a major air leak. And if the air leak is that bad you have more issues than worrying about going down a hill.
Go idle your truck at a low idle. Not release all brakes. Now try and use up the air in your tanks by keep stabbing or releasing and engaging parking brake. Or any other method of consuming air by breaking you can think of. I will be quite shocked if you can manage to get it lower than 80psi, and would not be surprised if it never gets below 100psi. If it does, you might wanna get that looked into before it causes problems.

 

At low idle pumping the brakes can drain the system, but you can pump the brakes on a hill without causing other problems and you aren't going to be at low idle coming down a hill either.

 

If you're using it commercially(to haul dirt from one place to another on the streets not in a yard and getting paid for it), then you need a cdl b, which also means you have to take the airbrakes test to avoid the restriction.

If it's not for commercial use then you don't need anything but a regular license.

 

And... wrong again.

Where do you people come up with this stuff?