It turns out.......

that Jodie works for the company I'm leased too.

oooops.

It seems that it's his job to verify the location of all trucks so as to maintain the project schedule. Apparently he also didn't realize that he's two time zones east of me.

Jodie...if you're reading this....don't call me before Mickey's big hand is on the twelve...and his little hand in on the ten.....your time...that'd give me time to drink some coffee....get woke up enough so I'm at least semi-coherent.

Hmmmmmm....wonder if he's old enough to know what a mickey mouse watch IS? Wonder if he understands analog clocks? These kids nowadays ....a digital wurld.

At any rate.....after Jodie woke me up I saddled up and headed on in.

Lovely traffic in Houston.....I'd go (more) insane....if I had to deal with it daily.

I finally got to the yard and drove in.....many of the office workers came out to see me.

I was getting ready to tell them they didn't to make such a big fuss when I noticed that it wasn't me they were looking at.....they were interested in the TRAILER.....not me. Imagine that.

Well to make a long story short. I dropped the impressive, pretty, properly working trailer and hooked up to the one that was being prepared for me in the shop. Quiet a comedown.

Worked on it all the rest of the day.....(fenders, lights, shims, air bags, paint.....etc.) right at quitting time for the shop we finished and I drove off into the sunset.

It took me about two hours to go less than sixty miles. I decided to stop at a truckstop to fuel and weigh.

The good news was that my gross weight...fully fueled....was about fifty thousand. That's a loss of ten thousand pounds from the other trailer.

The bad news was that the trailer was broke. Air bags flat.

I climbed underneath and noticed that the thing-a-ma-jig was broken and dangeling. (technical terms) . I called in and after much ado it was decided that a maintainence type would come out FIRST thing in the morning and fix it. He'd presumeably bring a new doohickey to fix the thingamajig.

.........................................

This morning came and went. I got a phone call from the maint. guy. He didn't sound like he really knew the area very well. Actually he didn't sound like he was real familiar with the whole concept of what a truck stop was. He kept asking me to clarify. How hard is it to go to I-10 then go west to the Love's in Brookshire? I'd have figured anyone would understand that? Certainly anyone who dealt with trucks for a living.

Apparently not....I went back to sleep.

When I woke up....somewhat later....he still hadn't showed....but the rain had.

COLD rain. In april in Houston? And it's snowing further west? Some times it's gone decades and not snowed this far south. hmmmmm....I'm loosing faith in Global Warming....maybe were all not gonna die like AlGore says.

He finally showed...in a car. I was expecting a service truck. How can he fix anything with what he can bring in a car?

Silly me.....he couldn't. I had to go back to the yard.

Took THREE hours this time.....heavier traffic. Got there after noon.

Me and two mechanics worked on it (well ....they worked....I handed em stuff and asked dumb questions)...till AFTER quitting time....except today was Saturday...the shop oughta have been closed....they was on overtime. Should work now.....I hope.

FOUR hours...(is there a pattern here?) and I'm back where I started this morning.....heavy traffic plus heavy rain = really, really slow going.

Hopefully it'll stop raining during the night and I can make some time tomorrow. Back to El Paso to load monday.



....................... more questions.....where to position the load?





This trailer gives me more options (assuming it can stand the strain) than the other one did. Aside from being lighter it's longer. When I stretch out to the max I'm a hundred and thirteen feets long....bumper to bumper.

That's a ninety one foot long trailer.....seventy nine foot of loadspace. Since the load is "only" seventy foot long I have some slack in where to put it.

Lemme see.

D=B(L-A)/L


where D= distance from a bridge point to the C/G of the load
B= bridge of the trailer (let's say 70.33 foot....nice round number...
it'll actually depend on how far the trailer is stretched)
L= weight of load=84,575
A=Added weight to axel group .


since I got's axel weight ...not just gross weights yesterday when I first stopped here

steer = 12880
Drive= 22480
Trailer= 15160
gross = 50520

I know that I can max at 60,000 on my drives in all states so A= 60,000-22480=37520


so.

D= 70.33(84,575-37520)/84575
D= 39.12 foot.

That means that the Center of gravity of the load.....needs to be 39.12 foot from my kingpin.

So where's the CG? Well ...except for one thing it'd be halfway down the middle....since the C/G of a homogenous cylinder is it's midpoint.

But there's that pesky flange. Wonder what it weighs? Bout four inches by eight inches by 13ft. 11 inch diameter? Solid Steel.

Heavy I bet.

And then there's the cantilever effect.


I lernt about THAT real early in life.

I was playing teeter-totter with a fat girl at school. I was about eight I think. Being as she was a little older and a LOT heavier than I was she was up closer to the middle of the teeter-totter. I was waaaaaay out on the end.

I guess I annoyed her or something.....maybe it was something I said?

Anyway.....when she was on the down side...and I was on the upside...she got off.

WHAM!!!......that hurt.

That's how I learned about the cantilever effect....also called leverage.

So....

Since I'm going to put the cradle 13 foot from the end of the tower and the tower weighs 84,575.lbs and IF it was homogenous (ignore the flange for a minit) it's be about 1200lbs a foot.

Times 13 is 15,600.

15,600 lbs NEGATIVE weight...off the drives and ON the trailer.

And then there's still that Flange too......
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Of course....I could just ignore all this and load it just like Scottie did. He has the same load,...and similar weight of truck/trailer. He figgered it out the hard way. Load it...weigh it....reload it....reweigh it. ....rinse and repeat....till he got it right. Took him all day.

He's made two trips already while I've been fooling around with trailers.



EvMick