Last time, I told you about my first day as Great Driver Mitch. It was a Friday, and we don't haul much on weekends this time of year. I drove just a couple of days in the second week. The third week, though, featured a long day every day-- with the partial exception of Tuesday. Work on Tuesday was artificially shortened.
The story isn't particularly technical, but I learned some time ago that many people know nothing at all about trucks. So, as usual, a little background is in order. You learn something new every day, after all-- unless you only read my site, in which case it's definitely not every day.
A tractor-trailer is held together by a large pin on the trailer (the "kingpin"), which is secured by locking jaws in a hinged plate on the tractor. That plate is called the "fifth wheel," presumably because it's vaguely round, and trucks only had four wheels back when it was invented. A fifth wheel looks like this.
A tractor-trailer is also known as a "semi," because the trailer is technically a semi-trailer; the weight is supported roughly half by the trailer axles, and half by the tractor. A full trailer would place relatively little weight (or none) on the vehicle pulling it-- like a trailer pulled by a car, or a child's little red wagon.
Now, since the front of a semi-trailer is so heavy, and it has to be about four feet off the ground in order to get the tractor under it, there has to be a rugged mechanism for holding it up. This consists of a pair of extendable legs, known (even officially) as "landing gear." A landing gear leg looks like this (external link). Both legs are conveniently adjusted by the single crank.
Most of time, a trailer is loaded and unloaded while still coupled to the tractor. Sometimes, though, this is a poor use of time or equipment, and a technique called "drop and hook" is employed. One form of drop and hook is 'spotting' empty trailers at several locations, where they can be loaded at the convenience of others, and then you come and haul the load once the trailer is full. This was the theory behind the third load of the day on Tuesday...
OK, so I wheeled into town 'bobtail' (without a trailer), to pick up an already loaded trailer, and then proceed merrily to Rochester. Since I don't have my license yet, I don't want to give the impression that I'm some sort of ham-handed idiot. As such, I dropped the air from the tractor rear suspension, and gently backed under just until the kingpin hit. Wouldn't want to bang into it like an unskilled fool. I then reversed direction and gave it a little tug. Wouldn't want to twist the driveshaft. Declaring (out loud, no less) the connection secure, I made the rest of the connections, and we were on our way.
My usual co-pilot is teaching me old-school techniques, and one of these is to use the trailer-only brake valve to test the trailer brakes-- and, in theory, the security of the coupling. So I did that, and the brakes worked. There was then a fairly loud and jarring bang. We figured that it must have been a particularly intense version of a common effect that follows using the trailer brakes-- because it couldn't possibly have been... no, that thought doesn't bear thinking on, because it couldn't be that!
The co-pilot then explains the importance of making sure you're hooked up properly, saying "Once you drop a trailer [accidentally], you never want it to happen again." I'm thinking that he's right-- that would be a very bad experience. A few seconds later, we slowly came to a small-- but steep-- rise, and there was a sound that I'd just as soon not hear again:
BOOM!
When the trailer fell, it sheared the pin on the landing gear foot that hit the pavement first. That single foot was designed to hold up 50 tons. Sheared it. We extracted the pin later, and it was shaped like a steel burrito.
As Shannon Foraker might say, "Oops."
So much for my looking like an idiot. Idiocy aside, though, we had to solve the problem of hooking back up. The very front of the trailer was nowhere near four feet from the ground, and the landing gear wasn't designed to lift a loaded trailer any great distance-- even with the crank in low gear.
The solution came in the form of a gigantic articulated wheel loader. Indeed, Caterpillar only makes three larger loaders. It picked up the front of the trailer-- perhaps fifteen tons-- and then the landing gear could be cranked down with ease. The trailer was backed back to the spot from whence it came, and the load was delayed due to the extremely uncool occurance. As it happens, I hauled it the next morning. Heavy bugger.
So, what had gone wrong? We'll never know, since if the problem had been detected before the disconnect, then nothing would have fallen off of anything. The working theory is that when I dropped the air on the tractor, the fifth wheel became too low, and the pin rode above the jaws that should have grasped it. There are a couple of other possibilities, but the bottom line is that it wasn't coupled properly in the first place. Car drivers will be happy to know that it is impossible for a Fontaine (our favored brand) fifth wheel to just come unhooked.
Needless to say, I am now paranoid about the possibility of a false coupling. It's just as my mentor said-- you never want it to happen again. Indeed, one of my college professors had a highly applicable saying: "You learn by doing-- and usually what you learn is 'don't do that.'"
According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the past tense of travel can be spelled as "traveled" or "travelled." For whatever reason, I dislike the aesthetics of both spellings. Ah, well...
I hadn't driven a truck lately, but I was a passenger two weeks ago, when we went to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada to pick up liquid fertilizer. Now, at least half of the time, when I say "liquid fertilizer," people think that it's a euphemism for manure. Logical, but not in this case. We haul a few types of liquid fertilizer, but lately it's been the all-nitrogen variety. My working hypothesis is that it's urea and ammonium nitrate dissolved in water-- a large amount of it, considering the stuff weighs 11 pounds per gallon.
Here in the United States, local distributors supply "30% nitrogen." I'll eventually run the math to see how they compute that. At the place we went to in Canada, the Canadian trucks picked up 28%, and the American trucks received 32%. As to why that is... regulation? tradition? Who knows.
Hamilton is at the western tip of Lake Ontario, and we picked up the fertilizer right on the waterfront. A large amount of industry occurs in that region, and it was neat to see it-- if mostly in the distance, on the other side of a broad channel. Only one ship within sight was unloading at the time. At that distance, I can only guess that the product was coal.
Anyway, the Canada trip went well. There's an awful lot to see while cruising along the QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way, possibly the highest-traffic highway in Canada)-- and it was all new to me, considering I haven't even been in the country since 1992. There's an amazing amount of greenhouse floorspace, for example.
We crossed the border both ways with just a few questions. Of course, we had customs papers for the load. We think they can measure the rough weight of the truck, so they know when you're empty. They run your license plate numbers. At some crossings, (but I don't think all, yet) they X-ray the trailer-- and if they're suspicious after a couple of tries, your truck will be guarded by heavily armed men while the situation is examined, probed, and sometimes disassembled.
They have some funny trucks over there in what the TV commercials
advocating Canadian tourism call "the world next door." I'll have to describe them sometime.
That trip was on a Wednesday, and was the same day that our only employee (a driver, oddly enough) quit. Slightly inconvenient, that. On Thursday, I tagged along with my brother again, and we hauled another load of urea ammonium nitrate (UAN)-- this time out of Rochester (New York). That's where most of it that we haul comes from.
After everything was loaded up and battened down (it's a liquid product, so nautical terms seem barely appropriate), I decided to go start the truck. Seemed like a good idea, so we could leave as soon as possible. My brother then proceeds-- instead of evicting me from the driver's seat-- to get in on the passenger side, and demand that we leave immediately.
Now, I had never before driven a truck loaded to the normal maximum gross weight of 80,000 pounds. The theory is the same as an empty truck: acceleration is low, stopping requires planning, and you have to watch it going around curves at speed. Yes, the theory is the same-- only more so. But, hey-- you learn by doing, right? It went fine, with a little coaching now and then.
By Friday, my brother had more-or-less hired a retired driver (and friend of ours) to be my co-pilot, and had scheduled three loads for me to haul. We have two trucks, and he was going to be busy all day, too. I am a holder of a CDL (commercial driver's license) learner's permit, so, legally, I need a licensed driver along for the ride. Aside from the legal matter, the advice is appreciated.
It ended up being two loads. The first was junk cars, and that went OK. The second was liquid fertilizer, which surprises no one this time of year. It ended up being something of an adventure.
We pick up this UAN stuff quite close to the Rochester airport. It's an old fuel or oil terminal, circa 1951. Now, I had observed the loading procedures at this location many times, but I hadn't attempted to perform any of them.
The fight to place the overhead loading pipe was more comical than anything else. Re-extracting it proved a little tricky, as it got pinched by one of the technologically advanced truck inner tubes that are inside the tank to counter the slosh effect (since the trailer isn't full to the top, a wave forms readily from acceleration or braking). Once it was freed, I head a little clink and splash.
The rubber gasket for the manhole lid had been hit perfectly by the end of the loading pipe to cause it to fall right in. It didn't float. I tried to fish it out, but I couldn't reach the bottom with available tools.
The main road headed west out of Rochester is interstate 490 (so named since I-90 passes directly below the city). If your destination has a southward bent, stay on 490. For almost straight west with a hint of North, get on route 531. As it happens, that's the direction to our home base-- so a huge percentage of our truck trips go down 531.
The delivery was supposed to be at a farm just east of the end of the 531, on route 31 (go figure). We had a street address. So I got off at the last exit, drove through quite slowly... and missed it. Suddenly, we were past the number (it was on the left-hand side), though there had been a mysterious dirt driveway that wasn't any too wide-- the ditches are deep enough to topple a truck with ease.
The solution (pun detected) was to continue a few miles, get back on the 531, and try again.
So I stopped across the road from the driveway, and went to have a look. Sure enough, there were plastic tanks there-- complete with a tractor and a little barn-- but no people. Did I mention that the delivery was two days late, since the driver had unceremoniously quit just before he would have hauled this load?
I had just about decided to either start making phone calls, or just fill the tanks, when a red pickup truck wheeled in. The guy didn't know what to do, but he called his home base to check. He reported the presence of a fertilizer truck, and then relayed the bad news: go to the main farm, which is off of Elmgrove road. That's the first exit from the 531. On the plus side, I was told that I couldn't miss it, and that there'd be a guy waiting.
So I went down 31, through an estimated four stoplights (which is a fair distance, on a curvy hilly semi-rural road), and eventually wound my way to the main farm. Couldn't miss it, indeed.
There was also, as promised, a guy waiting. He ambled over to the truck... and gave me the bad news. That place you just left? You have to go back there.
You see, they'd been expected a shipment of dry fertilizer that day, and had two hoppers waiting to receive it. Apparently, the red pickup guy had spoken with the home farm via phone again in the meantime, and they asked, "Wait, what kind of truck is it?" He told them it was a tanker... so they then knew of the mistake, but they didn't know how to contact me in the truck.
It looked like I might be able to drive around the building right there, so I asked. The guy says no, you'll have to pull around another building, back up, and go out the same way.
I do that, with some coaching. It wasn't too hard, since I had the target to back toward of two pickup trucks. With guys standing around. So if they'd moved the pickups, I could have driven out that way. Or maybe they knew something that I didn't. Mud, perhaps.
Wind back down the street, and come out to make the unassisted left turn onto Elmgrove. At a bit after 4 PM. This looked roughly like it was going to be possible on the twelfth of Never. But a shiny blue refuse truck eventually came to my rescue, stopping traffic to let me go ahead of him-- out of the kindness of his own heart.
Get on the 531, bop down to the end, make the now familiar right turn onto 31, and approach the driveway of failure intolerance. Came in on an initial arc that would lead to the ditch, backed up a bit, and that was that. The trailer wheels were feet from a really serious disaster.
The pump was brand new. Hadn't pumped a drop in its life. That wasn't a problem. What was a problem is that the outlet comes straight out the top, and we didn't have an elbow on hand (so to speak). So a two inch (inside diameter) line filled the 11 lb/gal product emerged from the top of the pump, and trailed down to the ground (about five feet). That didn't look healthy for the plastic pump housing, so I stood there to hold it against the fender.
Unfortunately, the hose junction on the outlet was leaking a decent amount. Attempting to tighten it with a small Crescent (tm) wrench failed.
About that time the red pickup guy from before drove up in his bulldozer. He scammed a second hose clamp from a nearby tank, had just the right size wrench, and we redid the thing with both hose clamps.
All better.
Had to fill three different tanks to get it all off. No big deal. And then...
The location of the aforementioned bulldozer left a relatively small space to back into for turning around. The other side of the laneway was some other guy's lawn (he was mowing it), so we didn't want to drive on that any more than necessary.
My co-pilot provided useful suggestions. It took a while. A sense of accomplishment was achieved.
That trip might be a record for most screwing around, but you know what? I got a lot of practice, and I once heard tell that you learn by doing.