Hauling Swinging Meat !

 

As I stated in an earlier post, my experience with bulk liquid tankers proved beneficial shortly there after as I got a job with Clay Hyder truck lines from Auburndale, Fla. and started a long stint hauling OJ from Fla. west and Meat back to Fla. While doing that I had a couple of good scares learning how the meat reacted differently than the liquid.

With a tanker, the weight stays low in the trailer but with swinging meat the weight is hanging from the roof so the shifting of the meat causes the trailer to want to fall over !  Making it very unstable in curves, and just uneven roadways or driveway transitions could keep you busy holding it straight.

My first scare was with Hyder as they were a test facility for Goodyear truck tires and at that time Goodyear was just starting to offer radial tires for trucks, so I found I had a new set of steer tires on my truck when I started out for Texas with my OJ. I didn't notice much difference until I loaded my load of swinging for Fla. out of Guymon, OK.

Usually we would cut over to 287 and run south to Dallas, then I-20 To Jackson, Ms., 98 down to Mobile, I-10 to I-75 and south to our delivery, but a few of us cut a lot of miles off by running the 2 lanes southeast across Ok. to I-40 and cut down through the woods to get to I-10 in Fla. I was one of those and found out real fast about the new tires and how they reacted to curves.

See, when you go into a curve with swinging, the first thing that shifts is your suspension, then the load, and you manage the curve but with radial tires you have a third shift, the tires rolling over the sidewalls. when your not ready for another shift, that tire roll, Your ass sucks seat springs big time !  But after time you learn how to compensate and all is well.

The Enterprise and Hidden Cameras !

Do you know why the Enterprise is like toilet paper ?

Because they both circle Uranus looking for Klingons !

                                                            smiley face hidden camera

 If you've ever been in a situation that you wished you had a hidden camera to record something, now you can. I now have 2 really nice units that you will cherish when you need them.

Go over to my other blog https://peacefullexistence.blogspot.com and learn all about them now. or click on the link in the right column marked Good cop, Bad cop !

 

clean toilet

 

Over 100 "FREE" games

 I just put a game link on this sight just for you. Look for it on the right. Have fun, Dutch

                                           

                        

videos anyone ?

 If you would like a video to promote most anything, contact me and I will make one for you to post anywhere that excepts MP4 videos.    Here are some samples

9/11 Where were you ?

                                         I was driving one like this at the time.

    I was just getting up from my 10 hour break at the "Wagon Wheel restaurant in Needles, California.

If you were lucky and got one of the half dozen parking spaces, you didn't have to park a block away across the street, and I got lucky. I went inside for some breakfast and found everyone glued to the tv looking at planes flying into the towers. No one could believe what they were seeing !

Thing had changed a lot in my life by then and have been changing ever since, not to inflect that that attack had anything to do with the changes.  Just sayin.

        Double bunk cabover "two story condo" was one of the first upgraded "class" trucks                             

The "ICC" and days of old !

 Most of the old farts like me have passed on and the new drivers have no idea how it was in the early days of trucking, so that lets the "DOT" get away with things that were unheard of back then.

At that time the "DOT" handled road repair and the "ICC" handled trucking. Carriers had to apply for authority to haul between points and publish their rates for shippers to see. Logs were used at that time as a measure of the company's compliance with "ICC" rules to grant them new authority, not like now, to punish drivers for trying to make a better living. I could go into a dissertation on logs at this point, but it would take up the whole post, so I'll leave that for later.

Suffice it to say that trucking was a skilled labor job until the DOT came aboard, [check some of my first post to get an idea of the skill it took to operate the rigs of that era] and the only difference between the pay you got for driving and the pay for working in a warehouse was the fact that you got to work twice as many hours so you made twice the pay, so for guys that didn't care that they didn't have a home life so they could have a bigger pay check, it made sense,

I brought that up because if you listen to "6 days on the road" in my last post, it speaks of the ICC is checking on down the line and I thought it would need explaining that they ran the scales and inspections, not the DOT. Trucking was a lot different then. We were more like the last American cowboy, which some ad agency used that very glorification, for awhile, combined with C. W. McCall's "CONVOY", [see other post], we were "Kings of the road" to many. 

Unfortunately, The very thing that drew everyone's attention to us was our downfall, The "C/B" ! 

Too many fowl mouth miscreants could hide behind the immunity of the radio to make anyone who listened very long, wonder what rock we crawled out from under, until c/b's and trucking became cuss words and caused the luster that we had worked for, to leave the industry forever.

Now we have automatic trans, air ride, air conditioning, cell phones portable tv's and all the comforts of a motor home instead of the spring ride, 2/70 ac [role 2 windows down and drive 70 mph ], 10 to 20 speed manual trans and all the "Good old Days" left behind.