How do you load a truck?

Answer 1

This is how to load a 53-foot trailer. The first thing you need to do is figure out what you're going to load on it. The whole vehicle can legally weigh only 80,000 pounds, including cargo. I say "only" because I went to pick up a trailer full of car parts and the bill of lading said the load weighed 79,000 pounds. The load. Not the load plus the trailer, but just the stuff the guy wanted to send. I told him to take all but 40,000 pounds of it off. "But it says 80,000 pounds on the side of your truck!" Yeah, and 32,000 pounds of that is the truck itself. Once he realized he couldn't legally ship that much weight, he was pretty cool about it. I've hauled 45,000 pound loads but they're tricky to balance. 43,000 pound loads make me pretty happy.

Next, figure out what weighs what. Normally when you load product into a trailer, all the skids of product weigh about the same. If you've got a really heavy few skids, the best place to put them is about halfway back. Don't stick 'em right over either of the tandems because that makes balancing the load very difficult--and sometimes you absolutely cannot do it.

Once you've figured out what's going where, start putting the freight in the trailer. Put the first skids right against the front wall of the trailer. You don't want them sliding forward if the driver has to put on the brakes suddenly. Then put the rest of the skids in the trailer, each one touching the one in front of it. If the freight doesn't completely cover the pallet, a lot of companies use airbags to keep the freight separated. These look like big brown-paper pillows.

You then block the freight from sliding backward, if it's not really heavy stuff. If you're hauling beer, you've got to use load locks or load straps on it. If you've got a load of rolls of printing paper, it will take a lot to move them so most guys just stick them in the trailer and call it good. Some freight needs to be strapped down so it won't jump around, like the guy I met in a truck stop yesterday who picked up a $50,000 Pizza oven this morning. He had to put straps across the top of it to keep it from jumping up and down when he hit a pothole. (Yes, we all have air ride suspension and it helps quite a bit--but if you manage to drop a drive wheel into a 6" deep pothole, the load's going to find out about it. So will the driver, for that matter.)

Next, write a bill of lading. Instructions for doing this are more complex than I want to put here now.

Finally, close the trailer doors and put your seal on.

The last thing that gets done is done by the driver: weigh the load if it's over 30,000 pounds. The truck can weigh 80,000 pounds, but there are also axle limits: 20,000 pounds for a single axle, 34,000 pounds for tandem axles. When you weigh the load, you want four numbers like so:

Steer axle 11,200

Drive axle 32,380

Trailer axle 33,100

Total 76,680

If you go to a Cat Scale (there are others, but I like Cat scales best) they give you a printed form with these numbers on them. It's a two part form--between the two parts is a trading card with a picture of a customized truck on it. Save this. They're cool.

Anyway, if either the drive or the trailer axle weighs over 34,000 pounds you've got to fix it. You do it by sliding your trailer tandems. If there's too much weight on the drive axle you slide the tandems forward, and if the weight's on the trailer axle you slide them back. You'll notice I said nothing about how to fix the steer axle--and that's intentional. The only way you'll get the steer axle close to 20,000 is to unhook the trailer. I've scaled a bunch of loads and I've never seen my steer axle over 11,500. The load pushes down on the rear axles, picking up the steer axle and reducing its weight.

Once the load's legal, you're ready to go.

Note that this is for non-hazardous loads. There's a whole set of rules governing hazardous loads.