Waiting on New Trucks thread.

It does make a huge difference. My maintenance and repairs budget is about the same as when I ran 3 to 4 older trucks back in the day. That includes tires, brakes, everything so actual maintenance and repairs is actually a much smaller percentage even. I do send my reefer units to TK for their services but it’s extremely rare we’re in a Kenworth or Cummins shop. It’s probably been a year since last time.

The guy across the street has a mobile truck and will do brakes and drums, tires, any repairs right there on the yard. It’s handy. We buy 4 drums of oil at at time and have all the filters and stuff in stock. I keep around 25 to 35 tires in stock about all times between steers, drives, and trailer.

Honestly, it’s hard enough running even my small operation. I can’t imagine having to keep a full time mechanic or two on staff. I’m pretty stoked though with some of these things we’ve put in place over the last two years as bad inspections have rolled off we are under 5% OOS on truck and driver on like 25 inspections each. The relationships and investments are paying off.

 

I should track it closely but I don’t really. I run disc in the front and I don’t think we’ve hardly ever changed them out. Maybe once.

The drums it seems like we’ll change out shoes and then when the 2nd set is done then the drum is done as well. Change those out and then by the trade cycle they are still ok.

Trailers it seems like shoes need replaced by 1.5 yrs old. Shooting from the hip here but that all should be close.

I think that’s a great idea doing disk all around, I’ll look into that for future spec. It’s crazy how long those last but also are very expensive to replace I remember.

Edit: I track each truck independently but don’t have set intervals to replace things. Each driver is a little different and being local, regional, or OTR as well. That’s where the service every 25k comes in handy as the truck gets the equivalent of a full inspection each service which allows us to know when something needs replaced or will soon.