Very Bummed

If it was a Wabash trailer that the bent DOT bumper was on then it wouldn't surprise me as I worked there and welded up a lot of Swift's. A majority of the welders take a crash course 40 hour in house class that teaches you nothing about the welding process, just how to lay anything that looks close to a halfway decent weld. The scariest part is the new welders get the slow jobs there as they can't keep up speed wise on the line, but those jobs are usually the most important. Such as building suspension frames, which luckily any Swift trailer bogey frame is built by someone else and shipped in.

A lot of scary things go on there though. The axle welders decided that in order to go faster to have more time to talk to each other, they'd just crank the machines up all the way. Having no formal welding training, they didn't understand this just makes metal brittle. That didn't end well. Outside of welding there were things like hubbers forgetting to put cotter pins on the castle nut for the hub. Luckily, the hubs usually fall off before they make it off the line, but one guy was unlucky enough to have it fall off going down 465 in Indy. I'm sure you can imagine how that ended.

The Wabash motto was "If in doubt, ship it out." It was all about getting your daily numbers there, not about the state of the product. The old let someone else deal with it theory.

 

Robert,actually you helped me possibly avoid this happening to me,i had your post in mind when i pulled (tried to anyways) away from a dock w/hook and sure enough felt a little resistance,went back there and yep greenlight but tailhook still in place,so thanks for posting that it helped me