On Tandems

I got running around 0700 this morning, heading north to Fort Collins. At the guard shack I parked my truck (after scaling) next to a CFI truck and opened up the rear to show them it was nice and clean. The guard then asked if I could help the CFI driver with her tandems since they were old and rusty. Sure, no problemo.

I grabbed my new STA-RAT bar thinking this would be a great time to test it out for the first time, forgetting that almost every CFI trailer uses a vertical tandem bar that it can't help with. Ah well. A small dint of effort (and my right forearm banged up against the underside of the trailer -- I had forgotten how fun that was at CFI) and the tandems decided I was the boss and did their part.

After chatting with the lady driver for a few minutes I left to drop my empty and pick up the loaded trailer. Since the trailer number was 7118, I knew it would be old and crusty as well, as our oldest trailers begin with "71". This gave me the opportunity I had been looking for to try out the STA-RAT bar and it worked as advertised. Yay team.

There was quite a bit of room in the rear of the trailer so my first concern was it was loaded too heavily at the nose end and I might have to have them rework it. I slid the tandems all the way up to try to get as much weight to the rear as I could then blocked off the load with a couple of my load bars.

Damn I'm good and damn I'm lucky, as the 44,500 pound load put my drives at 34,060 with the tandems all the way forward.

I only made one stop between there and Omaha, and that was in Big Springs, Nebraska where I had another steak at the Sam Bass Saloon located next to the Bossleman Pilot there. Mmmm mmm good.

Since this load doesn't deliver until Monday morning I've t-called it here in the yard. I'm going to chat up the morning planner tomorrow to see if I can get an out-and-back load or loads tomorrow so I can deliver it and get my new (brand new) load locks back.