Thursday, October 9, 2008

Scaling

Yesterday I departed Milwaukee, Wisconsin just before the worst part of the afternoon rush started and it turns out there wasn't a truck stop with a scale between there and where I ended up last night. No big deal, there isn't a weigh station until you get into Illinois anyway, and right at the Wisconsin / Illinois border are a Pilot, Flying J and independent truck stop, each with a scale.

I first went to the Flying J and scaled my load, but the printout that resulted was ridiculous. It showed my total weight at around 56,000 pounds which was (as it turns out) almost 24,000 pounds light. I complained when I got the printout and they had me go back around to scale again after they reset the mechanism.

Second time through it shows me at about 80,400 pounds which is a much more believable number, given that I have (apparently) over 20 tons of beef in back. Still, I was a bit hesitant to use the results from their scale so I went across the street to the independent truck stop and use the CAT scale there.

That scale reported my gross weight as 80,460. Unfortunately, I'm allowed only 80,000 total, with no more than 34,000 on my set of four drive tires and another 34,000 on my trailer tandems. I realized I would have to adjust my sliding fifth wheel to move a thousand pounds or so forward on to my steer tires and also slide the tandems back to shift about 2,000 pounds forward on to my drives.

The result?

Steers: 12,100
Drives: 34,320
Tandems: 34,040

Basically, a perfect adjustment. The feds allow APU-equipped trucks a 400 pound weight increase so long as it ends up on your drives, so I'm clear there. My steers are rated at 12,300 and I'm only carrying 40 extra pounds on my tandems. Given the hundreds of pounds of adjustment that happens with any sliding of my tandems there just isn't a better weight distribution. Plus, as I burn fuel (approximately one pound of fuel per mile as I drive) the weight will come mostly from the drives, and a bit from the steers.

Still, I was a bit concerned heading into Illinois. Not every state agrees with the APU weight increase and I don't recall if this is one of those states. Believe it or not, I get green lights on my Prepass for both open scales I ran across so I never even had to pull in!


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The drive out to Marshall, MO was tedious, with lots of back roads and state highways in Missouri. Those three "bonus" miles I got in yesterday's report were used up when I had to take a detour around a closed bridge over the Missouri river. I was hoping they would last, too.

For some reason, I keep getting preplans that I'm not legally able to run. Today's first illegal preplan involved me taking a load from the same town I'm delivering and running it down to Russellville, Arkansas for 0300 tomorrow morning. Since I've only got an hour or two left to drive today and that trip was over 300 miles (across some of the shittiest roads I've ever been across) it wasn't difficult to decline. The second proposed load had me picking up in Kansas City then running up to Omaha by 0500 tomorrow, which I couldn't make legally for the same reason. Finally, a third junky load showed up that I could actually run legally, going from the caves in Independence, Missouri up to the ConAgra plant in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Picks up tomorrow morning and doesn't deliver until the following day, but that's fluff since we drop trailers there 24/7.

Fuel at our yard was $3.34 today and is going down to $3.32 tomorrow. Fuel prices are crashing as our economy slows way down and people do now what they should have been doing all along: conserving energy.