Maintenance

By Denise Rondini

It is an old trucking industry adage that while the sales department sells the first truck, the service department sells the second, third and fourth trucks. According to David Gerrard, senior vice president of distribution at Navistar, “Without an effective relationship on the service side of the house, it is very difficult to maintain the customer relationship.”

Tags: Dealers

By Jim Park

Retreading tires provides the absolute lowest cost per mile of any tire management strategy. When coupled with other enhanced preventive maintenance measures, a retreaded tire can easily go half a million miles or more, all things being equal.

Tags: Retread, Tires

By Jim Park

Ten years ago, you could buy a decent steer tire for $300. Not anymore. But, then again, you're not buying the same tire anymore either. Long-term pricing trends show that the cost of raw materials used in tire manufacturing has gone up over the past decade, along with the shelf prices for tires, but consumers haven't seen the price swings for tires that manufacturers have seen for materials over the same period of time.

Tags: Goodyear, Continental Tires, Yokohama Tire Corp., Stemco, Guayule, Automatic tire inflation systems

By Jim Park

Tire maintenance is like preparing a fine meal. Unless you really like cooking and are very good at it, it's far easier – and safer sometimes – to visit a nice restaurant. Here are five reasons you might want to consider outsourcing your tire work.

Tags: Maintenance, Goodyear, Michelin, Outsourcing, Tires

By Deborah Lockridge

It's more important than ever to protect a truck's air system from contamination, because there are more and more on-vehicle technologies making use of that air. That's why having and taking proper care of an air dryer is vital.

Tags: Maintenance, Bendix, Brakes, Air Dryers

By Jim Park

A driver picks up a trailer from a drop yard. Before departing, the driver does a walk-around inspection, kicks the tires, checks the lights and then sticks it into the wind. He or she has no idea how much air pressure is in those tires, except to be fairly sure none of them is flat — visibly flat, that is. Any one or several of those tires could be underinflated, or even technically flat.

Tags: Goodyear, Continental Tires, Tire Inflation, Tire blowout, Tires

By Tom Berg

What are you doing with the spent oil from your engines? Most fleets are reusing it somehow, perhaps by burning it in special furnaces to heat the shops or selling it to a recycler who'll put it to other uses. Drain oil was once dumped or given away, but since the rise of petroleum prices on world markets, it now brings as much as 95 cents a gallon.

Tags: Valvoline, Universal Lubricants, Re-refined oil, Safety-Kleen, Clean Harbors, API, Oil

By Tom Berg

There was a time when fleet managers and owner-operators specified many components on their new trucks and tractors, but that's been seriously curtailed by vertical integration — the practice of manufacturers controlling the design and spec'ing process using parts they build themselves or get from a few suppliers.

Tags: Air filter, Maintenance

By Evan Lockridge

The economic recession had profound effects on trucking, but one of the most surprising is a greater need for tires on trucks that need to be used in more than one application. That's the opposite of another trend, which is more single-application-specific tires.

Tags: Goodyear, Michelin, Retread tires, Continental Tires, Bridgestone, Tires

By Jim Park

Changing truck tires isn't rocket science. Since tire service isn't cheap, it's not uncommon to find smaller fleets and even some bigger ones doing their own tire maintenance. But safety needs to be the priority in any shop.

Tags: Safety, Tires, Shop Tools

By Jim Park

People will tell you that wheel balancing isn't necessary these days. Going back 10 or 20 years, new tires often needed a small amount of weight to balance out the irregularities in the old production process. With today's more exacting manufacturing standards, irregularities are the exception. But that doesn't mean you can't benefit from wheel balancing.

Tags: Tires, Wheels

By Deborah Lockridge

When it come to trends in axles and suspensions, it's all about efficiency. Fleets are constantly looking for ways to become more operationally efficient, whether it's fuel economy, increased payload, lower maintenance costs, longer equipment life, or driver productivity.

Tags: Firestone, Reyco Granning, Meritor, Suspensions, Hendrickson, Axles, Dana Spicer

By Deborah Lockridge

The slow economic recovery and the federal government's new Compliance, Safety, Accountability enforcement program will help drive demand for aftermarket pads and shoes for Class 4-8 trucks, according to a new study by Frost & Sullivan, while increasing demand for disk brakes could prove a challenge to independent service providers.

Tags: Frost & Sullivan, disc brakes, Aftermarket, Brakes

By Thomas Bray, Editor, J.J. Keller & Associates

Whether you have one truck or 20,000, the FMCSA's maintenance regulations apply to you. The safety and compliance experts at J.J. Keller have tips for owner-operators and small fleets on how to develop a maintenance program that will meet federal standards.

Tags: Maintenance, FMCSA, Owner-Operators

By Jim Park

If stretching your tire budget means buying cheaper tires, you may be cheating yourself. You'll get more tires for less money — and that looks good up front — but does that theory hold up after six months or a year?

Tags: Retread tires, Tires

By Bob Rose, Contributor

In December, the FMCSA made good on its commitment to Congress to install refinements to the CSA initiative by implementing 11 changes to the Safety Measurement System. J.J. Keller's Bob Rose has more details.

Tags: FMCSA, Safety, J.J. Keller, Compliance, CSA, Hazmat

By Contributed Pete Haskell, Director of Heavy Duty Sales with Luber-finer

In the heavy-duty trucking business, fleet managers must be ready to expect the unexpected as seemingly minor unexpected maintenance can ultimately lead to a major system failure

Tags: Under The Hood, Maintenance, Filters, Luber-finer, oils

By Deborah Lockridge

Three years from now, you'll see a new API diesel engine oil-service category, designed to help meet federal greenhouse gas/fuel economy standards, which have a final phase-in date set for model year 2018 trucks.

Tags: Under The Hood, API, oils, Chevron, Shell

One of the most common reasons for an officer to pull a driver over is for a faulty light. Below are some basic guidelines on how to troubleshoot some of the problems that may arise with a trailer lighting system

Tags: Trailers, CSA, Lighting, Safety, Compliance

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

For years, some fleets have turned to synthetic engine oils for easier starts in cold-weather climates and to help them extend oil drain intervals

Tags: Under The Hood, Maintenance, Engine Oil, synthetic oil

By Glen Sokolis, Contributor

Weather forecasters are predicting not only one of the coldest, but the snowiest winters in the last five years. Here are a few simple tips to help maintain your equipment and fuel tanks

Tags: More Maintenance, diesel, Winter

Winter weather and the harsh driving conditions that come with it can be hard on trucks, but Mitsubishi Fuso Truck of America suggests that downtime can be minimized with proper maintenance procedures.

Tags: More Maintenance, Winter

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor & Tom Berg, Senior Editor

You don't have to go far to find a fleet having trouble with engines. Mostly they report emissions systems problems, not surprising given the short time the engine makers had to meet the Environmental Protection Agency's tight timelines. To be fair, owners of diesels meeting EPA 2010 standards are reporting fewer problems than they had with the first few generations of EPA 2007-compliant engines

Tags: Under The Hood

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

In tire and wheel mounting, the line between right and wrong is a thin one. A few thousandths of an inch on either side of correct can throw tires and wheels into a mean wobble or cause them to bounce up and down like pistons

Tags: Tires, tires & wheels, concentric mounting, tire troubleshooting

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Uptime and utilization are everything, so you don't want a truck sitting on the shop floor during basic battery maintenance. Most fleets pull the batteries at the first sign of trouble and replace them with fresh batteries to get the truck moving again, planning to deal with the bad batteries later. But what killed the batteries in the first place

Tags: Under The Hood, batteries, Maintenance

By Deborah Lockridge, Editor in Chief

By January of 2016, you'll see a new API diesel engine oil classification, designed to help meet federal greenhouse gas/fuel economy standards. In fact, you may, for the first time, see two separate categories

Tags: Under The Hood

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

When it comes to the alignment on your truck, "close enough" can cost you a lot of money

Tags: Tires

Webb Wheel has added a new training video along with an associated tech certification test to the Training Toolbox section of its website

Tags: Chassis & Brakes

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Think of a tire casing as a foundation. It's the foundation of the whole tire, but also the foundation of a successful tire-cost management program

Tags: Tires

With just two full-time facilities to handle maintenance on a fleet of more than 2,700 trailers scattered across the lower 48 states and Mexico, conducting regular trailer inspections can be a daunting task for Murray, Ky.-based Paschall Truck Lines.

Tags: Trailers

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Although the maintenance-free tractor-trailer is still a few years off, there are really only two big maintenance items left when it comes to axles and suspensions: the shock absorbers and the air springs. Some historically large maintenance items today are designed to almost outlive the trucks

Tags: Chassis & Brakes

By Tom Berg, Senior Editor

There always have been a lot of reasons for drivers to do effective pre- and post-trip inspections on trailers and power units. Starting in 2010, we've had another: Compliance, Safety, Accountability better known as CSA

Tags: Trailers

By Rolf Lockwood, Contributing Editor

There's no shortage of information on wheel integrity: posters, pamphlets, simple one-page instruction sheets and a bunch of YouTube videos, not to mention mandatory day-long wheel-installation courses. We're inundated with education on how to make sure wheels stay attached to the truck

Tags: Tires

By Deborah Lockridge, Editor in Chief

High diesel and crude oil prices may make headlines, but the cost of engine oil has risen, as well, making an extended-oil-drain strategy more appealing

Tags: Under The Hood

By Rolf Lockwood, Contributing Editor

Many fleet operations are too small to benefit from a sophisticated maintenance-management software system. They may be right, but probably not because there isn't a software product that would suit them

Tags: Managing The Shop

It used to be when you turned the vehicle off, all electrical loads went away. Now that today's trucks use electronics full time, including the extra hotel loads for driver comfort, these electrical loads (parasitic loads) increase the demands on the vehicle electrical system

Tags: More Maintenance

By Rolf Lockwood, Contributing Editor

In part one, we talked about how important it is to train technicians, and how classroom training that affords hands-on experience is the best. However, it's not always feasible to send your techs off for training or even to allot hands-on time at your own location

Tags: Managing The Shop

By Rolf Lockwood, Contributing Editor

The need for first-rate maintenance of our trucks and trailers is obvious, so let's not start this article blathering about the necessity of cost control and the ever-increasing challenge of safety compliance. All that's a given

Tags: Managing The Shop