1/19/2012  Outsourcing Your Tire Program
By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

The service truck arrives at 8:30 Sunday morning, as usual. The two tire techs unload 16 freshly mounted and balanced, retreaded drive tires, eight new steer tires on reconditioned wheels, and a take-off drive tire sent out for a section repair the previous week.

One tech goes to work exchanging the steer tires while the other begins the yard check. Every tire in the yard will be inspected for damage and wear, pressure checked and re-inflated if necessary, and tread depths will be noted for wear analysis. A handheld data collector makes the chore easy and record keeping even easier.

Three trailer tires are marked for removal and repair. They'll be changed out before the crew leaves.

At 3:15, the last of the exchanged drive and steer tires are loaded on the truck, along with the three damaged trailer tires.....

1/4/2012  Charging Batteries in Cold Weather

One of the biggest misconceptions is that batteries charge the same throughout the year. They simply don't! In warm weather (above 40 degrees), batteries are very easy to recharge. They can normally take as much charge that the vehicle charging system can provide. Even deeply discharged battery packs can be completely recharged in a few hours if the only issue is a discharged battery not defective batteries.

However, the colder it is outside, the less charge the battery pack wants to accept. When it is very cold, the electrolyte in a flooded cell battery becomes like jelly and the molecular action in the battery slows down. The battery is similar to a tube of toothpaste -- difficult to get out and almost impossible to put back in.

The operator may become fooled by the way the vehicle responds in cold weather. The voltmeter on the dash displays a correct charging range and the lights are bright so it is assumed that the batteries are charging as normal.....

1/2/2012  Dispense With the Grief of Managing Tires: Let a Service Partner Do It for You
By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

The service truck arrives at 8:30 Sunday morning, as usual. The two tire techs unload 16 freshly mounted and balanced, retreaded drive tires, eight new steer tires on reconditioned wheels, and a take-off drive tire sent out for a section repair the previous week.

One tech goes to work exchanging the steer tires while the other begins the yard check. Every tire in the yard will be inspected for damage and wear, pressure checked and re-inflated if necessary, and tread depths will be noted for wear analysis. A handheld data collector makes the chore easy and record keeping even easier.

Three trailer tires are marked for removal and repair. They'll be changed out before the crew leaves.

At 3:15, the last of the exchanged drive and steer tires are loaded on the truck, along with the three damaged trailer tires.....

12/15/2011  Are Your Wheel Bearings Adjusted Properly?
By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Good and bad in the wheel-bearing world is divided by a very fine line - about the width of two human hairs, in fact. That's not much of a margin considering the potential consequences of improper adjustment.

Loose bearings will cause the wheel to run in negative camber (the top of the wheel tilts inward from the vertical centerline of the wheel). The classic and obvious signs of loose bearings include irregular wear on the inside edge of an inside dual tire or irregular cupping on steer tire shoulders. Other more subtle indicators of loose wheel bearings include premature failure of the wheel seals, persistent intermittent ABS fault codes, and brake lining wear that appears as tapered wear on the inside edge of the top shoe and the outside edge of the lower shoe.....

12/12/2011  Tire Report: The Art & Science of Alignment
By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Vehicle alignment is a great example of why they teach geometry in high school. How many times did you wonder when you would ever use Euclidean geometry or the Pythagorean theorem?

Vehicle alignment is pure and applied geometry, without the five-dollar words. From a purely mathematical perspective, alignment is about a series of arcs, angles and intersecting lines that are supposed to keep a truck and all its tires going in the same direction.

The pure science, however, doesn't always account for suspension irregularities, tire peculiarities, manufacturing tolerances, vehicle loading or the 2% crown found on most roads. ....

12/12/2011  Tire Report: Factory Settings vs. 'As-Driven'
By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

If something is set to factory specs it must be just right, right? In the alignment world, "factory specs" really means it's close enough. Close enough, however, might not be good enough when your tires are being chewed right off the wheels.

Understand the OE's perspective here: They have just a few minutes to install an axle or set of axles on a frame, and something less than 10 minutes to verify alignment later in the assembly process. When building 200 trucks a day, time is a very expensive luxury.

A little tolerance on the spec isn't necessarily bad. It gets the truck out the door in reasonably good shape at reasonable cost at a level of accuracy engineers, assemblers and warranty people can live with. But is it good enough for your truck in your application?....

11/30/2011  Training Technicians - Part One
By Rolf Lockwood, Editor at Large

Training has probably never been more valuable or important than it is in 2011. That's true no matter what the trucking job, but it's especially true in the shop. Added to the traditional obligation of getting trucks and trailers in and out of there faster than humanly possible, the maintenance chief has acquired the huge and ever-growing burden of compliance in recent years.

So the bedraggled shop super has what are often competing priorities. Fix it fast, but make darned sure you fix it right. No more cutting the odd corner, making a well-educated guess that a trailer's slightly iffy wiring can wait until the next PM. No more saying "Yeah, OK" to an anxious customer or a screaming dispatcher even if you'd like to hold that trailer for just half a day longer.

Given the risk of a failed on-the-road inspection and resulting poor CSA scores and out-of-service time - or worse yet, an accident - you can't run things like that anymore.

Whether the customer is a paying client or your own operations department, he should be hearing "No can do" a lot more often. ....

11/29/2011  Long-Life Trailer Specs
By Tom Berg, Senior Editor

Everything has a life span, but some of the things we make die sooner than they used to. For trailers, shortened lives usually can be blamed on corrosion caused by aggressive anti-icing chemicals spread on road pavements. But abuse by those who work around them is also a factor.

Trailer manufacturers occasionally tout long-life packages. Last March at the Mid-America Trucking Show, Dorsey talked about a 10-year warranty for its Lifeguard 5000 refrigerated van. Vanguard's vans use only galvanized steel in key areas, including landing gear, rear door frames and underride guards. At the ConExpo construction show, several builders showed trailers whose underside components were of galvanized steel. Manac offers a package of galvanized components on dump and flatbed trailers for about $800 - cheap insurance against corrosion.

Corrosion damage has become a major subject of discussion at meetings of the American Trucking Associations' Technology & Maintenance Council. Out of the resulting sessions come advice for coping with it. In short, vehicles can be built with special materials and treatments to resist corrosion, and to stand up to misuse by careless workers. But fleets can't afford to buy all of them.....