Maintaining Equity

Your business will incur debts and it needs to do so in order to run smoothly.  An important consideration is that your debts shouldn't outweigh your income.  The equipment you use shouldn't cost more than its worth.  The equipment should also be able to be sold at a profit or at a reasonable rate so that if you need to sell everything, you can pocket some money and not just break even.

New trucks are appealing because they have a warranty and they meet all of the latest regulations such as the C.A.R.B. regulations in California.  Since they are new, they are less prone to failure due to simply being old.  Older trucks' components wear out.  The plastic and rubber dries out.  The wiring becomes more corroded.  As soon as the truck rolls of the assembly line it starts to age.

Used trucks can be a great deal if they're in good condition or have been maintained.  Even if the used truck hasn't been maintained properly, a skilled mechanic or someone who is mechanically inclined can bring the equipment back up to speed.

The point here is that the value of the equipment should exceed the amount owed on it.  The condition of the equipment is important because the more you keep up with the maintenance and keep records of the repairs, the more value there is when it comes time to sell.  These days where the aerodynamics and fuel efficiency of the truck play a major role in the truck's value, it pays to know when to sell what you have and buy new.

There is also a strategy that is popular where you buy equipment and use it until its at its sell point, then sell it and pocket the money.  Next you buy the equipment with financing to replace your sold equipment and make payments on it while the funds you brought in from your recently sold equipment collects interest in a retirement account.

You can buy and sell trucks, trailers, tools, and anything else your business needs keeping in mind that you should only own so long as there's value.  As long as the value is there, your business will stay in the black.  The best situation to be in is to have a piece of equipment that you can pay off quickly and use for years to come with small payments and little maintenance.  In this scenario, you would buy a new truck at a discount or a used truck for a reasonable price.

You would either make the payments on the new truck or pay the used truck off quickly.  The truck would then be used for several years past its payoff date and the maintenance would be a priority so as not to trump the equipment's former payment amount per month.  It's important to keep on top of the maintenance.  The older the truck, the more attention it needs.

Cold Weather And Semi Trucks

Photo by Nick Gray

Road salt, snow, and bitter cold temperatures wreak havoc on trucks.  Not only does a truck driver have to watch out for road hazards and bad road conditions in the wintertime, the truck owner also has to keep the chemicals that are sprayed on the ground, off their equipment and out of the inner workings of the machinery.

Here are some easily overlooked issues that occur:

1. Windshield washer fluid isn't mixed with enough antifreeze.

2. Oil is the wrong weight which can make it too thick when the truck is shut off for long periods of time in  sub-zero temperatures.

3. The components on the truck that are metal can become brittle in extreme cold weather, so running the engine and circulating the fluids before they get too cold can keep the internal temperatures of the metal at an acceptable level.  The block heater won't do that as it will only keep the engine oil a little warmer than the air temperature.

4. The cooling system components can contract and expand greatly in the winter temperatures causing leaks anywhere in the entire cooling system line.

5. Tire pressures drop greatly in cold weather. This is bad for the tires and your fuel mileage.

6. Any imperfections in the windshield can be aggravated by the temperature differences from the cab to the outside. A small chip in the windshield can crack the entire glass when the temperature outside is drastically different from the inside.

7. Ice build-up on the truck and trailer can add weight, and can also be a hazard when it builds up and falls off during transit.

8. Air lines can freeze if the air dryer isn't doing its job, resulting in the brakes locking up.

9. Road salt can corrode the electrical connections on everything from the lights to the ECM.  One preventative measure is to seal the connections with dielectric grease.

Winter weather should not be underestimated.  It can destroy your equipment if you don't prepare for it.

2014 Is Almost Here!

January 1st is the day that my truck is no longer legally allowed to travel in one of the 50 United States of America.

California.

We practically never go to California so it will have zero impact on our business, but it will be annoying.  The idea that I have been paying taxes to the government to go toward the highways in every state in the nation, and then not be permitted to drive on some of the nation's roads because of type of equipment I own, seems wrong to me.  I should be allowed to drive in California despite the dirty air that my engine emits.

I have been considering my options.  Here they are:

1. Stay out of California until my truck needs to be traded in or sold for a new one.  That should take another 2 or 3 years.

2. Buy a new truck.
    A. By trading in my truck for a complete new truck and sleeper.
    B. By buying a new day-cab truck and moving my sleeper and generator to the new truck, then selling my old day cab or converting it into a motor home.

3.  Add a DPF to my existing equipment which will ruin the Series 60 engine under the hood and result in many days of downtime for shop repairs.

4. Or the option that I have spent the most time looking into - selling the engine I have now and getting another engine from a newer, wrecked truck.

That last option I'm going to go into some detail on right now because it is of specific interest to me.

So here goes:

Trucks get wrecked for many reasons.  I don't want to be morbid, but this is the only time the faulty education in trucking works to my benefit.  I'm not saying all trucks are wrecked by students fresh out of school, but I know MANY are.  I also know trucking companies routinely place new students in brand new trucks.  I don't need to tell anyone what happens next.  So skipping ahead...there are new trucks, which have somehow or another ended up wrapped around a pylon or a bridge support, sitting around with new engines in them.  However it happened, the truck is junk, but in many cases the entire contents under the hood are up for grabs.  This includes all the new emissions equipment.

The next challenge is finding a good engine that wasn't involved in a fire, submerged in a lake, or has a cracked block.  So the search begins.  What's beautiful about this option is that all of the major truck manufacturers are making EPA compliant trucks, and as time goes by more and more of them are hitting the roads.  Literally.  And sometimes they hit pylons.  Literally.  So the longer you can wait, the cheaper and more plentiful these engines become.  Fortunately, I can wait a LONG time.  So if I can wait a long time, why do I care about the deadline coming up in January, right?  As a conscientious operator of a truck, I want to be compliant with the laws in all of the states.

Unfortunately, half of our job is trying to keep up with the various laws in each state.  The other half is keeping the truck in good condition, and then the other half is staying in good physical condition, and the other half is finding good loads, and the other half is etc. etc. etc.

When you have found an engine that will fit your needs, chances are the new engine needs new wiring and computers inside the dash.  This is where all the magic happens.  The biggest challenge is the wiring.  The engine will fit under the hood and bolt right up to the transmission you already have.  The DPF and DEF tank will bolt right onto your existing frame.  The mechanical aspect is easy.  Heavy!  But easy.  Once you have the heavy lifting done, you need to mimic the truck the engine came out of.  The trick here is maintenance in the future.  You don't want to be in a situation where the truck has impossible situations to diagnose.  Because you are doing the wiring, you are in control of how easy the wiring access points are.  The truck's dash is still limiting, but most of the gauges and dials in a 2013 truck are the same as in a 2007.  There are a few different additions such as DEF tank level indicator and DPF condition indicator, but for the most part, the HVAC, engine brake, lighting, and other basic dash switch functions are the same.

You're also at an advantage doing this operation because you can video your progress or just take pictures along the way.  Most of the dealerships and mechanics I have spoken with are very against this maneuver for various reasons.  The reputable shops don't want to do this type of engine conversion for warranty reasons, as they don't want to be liable for any repercussions down the line, and the dealerships want you to buy a new truck.  There is no money in this for an operator who can run one truck for 30 years.  There are also shops who are so scared of this type of conversion, they feel you are some kind of sick demented wacko (which I AM) wanting to do something like this, under the guise of "looking out for your best interests", they try to talk you out of what they believe is the most stupid idea they've ever heard of.

Fortunately, California has a number of shops doing these conversions because the millions of people who live in California have to, well, LIVE there.  They don't get to pack up and leave their home or decide to just run a truck outside of the state for as long as they want to.  These shops are charging between $5,000 and $10,000 in labor to perform the conversion.  You just have to supply the parts.  There's even one outlet online that has engines from all over the country.

That website has volumes of information on it, and the people selling the engines will set you up with one of their mechanics and try to get the whole process streamlined into one call and one price.  I've found a few engines on there that range from $15,000 to $30,000.  On top of that price is the cost of shipping the engine to the shop doing the work, that can vary from $1,000 to $3,000.

These engine suppliers will try to supply everything you need to make your old truck into a new one from the dash forward, but  inevitably leave out a few electronic components - either because they were destroyed, or they just aren't there.  In this case, more parts must be found to complete the conversion.  Those parts usually run about $6,000.

So, once you buy an engine, ship it, remove your old engine, and install your new one, you're out somewhere between $25,000 to $40,000.  You'll still have an engine to sell to someone else, which should be worth at least $10,000.  That'll drop your out-of-pocket cost to somewhere between $15,000 to $30,000.  If this conversion means you'll get another 10 years out of your truck once it's done, you've made a wise decision.  There's still a chance that the engine has something wrong with it, though.  So let's say you do this conversion and the engine fails after 100,000 miles for whatever reason.  You can still repair it.  In that 100,000 miles, you should have recouped your investment and now are only doing repairs.  You've lowered your costs.

Even if you have to do an inframe on the engine, as long as the block isn't cracked, you have a good egg to work with.  An inframe will only cost about $10,000 and will buy you another 400K miles or better.  If you're lucky, another million miles.  After all, you're an owner operator and this is your truck.  You take care of it like no one else can, and you can make it last for decades.

This also should increase the resale value of the truck - assuming you have good records and can keep the electronics in such a way that another mechanic won't run screaming from the truck when a sensor fails and they have no electrical schematic for reference.

Regardless of which route you choose, you have to keep in mind the future of your business. Will you lease your truck onto a known carrier, or will you use it elsewhere under your own authority  Can you sell it later?  Will you put another driver in it?  There are many options to consider and you must make a decision.

I am deciding to wait until later this year and keep shopping around.  My current, most attractive option is to buy a new day-cab truck, put my current sleeper on the frame, and sell my old truck day-cab to someone who can use it.  I can do this at any time in the future, at a price I'm comfortable with.  Plus, the day-cab swap route offers more resale value and less mechanical headaches down the road.

Or I could just turn my old truck into this:

This is still legal in California without a DPF.  Oh yeah!

The Valve Adjustment

Trucks break down when they aren't cared for.  One of the yearly mandatory services that you must perform on a truck is the overhead valve adjustment.  This isn't as difficult as you may think.  Over 20 years ago I started adjusting valves on Chevy engines and to this day these diesel engines are practically the same.

There are a few differences.  On the 350 Chevy engine, all you do is remove the valve cover, run the engine at idle and release the valves until they start clacking, then tighten them down a 1/2 turn.

My engine is a 60 series Detroit Diesel and all you have to do is remove the valve cover with the engine off, turn the crank shaft to top dead center for each set of valves and then set the intake with a feeler gauge followed by the exhaust valves.  Tighten the valves with the lock nut and they are adjusted.  Then just clean the valve cover, replace the valve cover gasket and then install the valve cover.

Most shops charge $500.00 for this service, but a good shop will include a blow-by test and a dyno of the engine, plus checking the charge air cooler for leaks.  Sometimes you can catch the shop when they are having a sale, but if you don't have time, and you have a spare valve cover gasket laying around, you can do it yourself.  It really isn't that difficult.

Tire Patch

This is a picture of a tire on my trailer.  Notice the white dirt on the tread.  This is a very simple way of detecting where the tire touches the road.  This tire is getting the maximum tread on the road, which is what I want.  This is called the tire patch.  The more inflated these wide base tires are, the smaller the tire patch and the less traction you get. 

With a smaller tire patch you also get more miles per gallon because there is less rolling resistance, but the tire will wear out faster and it is very unsafe in wet or slippery conditions.

In the absence of white dirt, many things can be used.  You can even use chalk by drawing a line across the tire in several places and seeing where the chalk has been worn away after driving around the parking lot. 

The tire patch will change depending on how much weight you have on your trailer.  There are several ways to manage your tires.  Tire pressure is the number one reason for tire failure.  In addition to that, tire punctures are one of the main reasons for decreased tire pressure.  A great place to acquire tire punctures is the shoulder of the highway where debris accumulates over time. 

Tires are relatively important so knowing the most you can about how they play a roll literally, can help you greatly improve your bottom line.

Brake Shoes

The following discovery is the result of a pre-trip, walk around inspection. 

A bad brake shoe.  Normally I don't have any issues with brakes because I don't really use them.  Most of the time we do highway driving, and to slow down, we just use the engine brake.  The engine brake is a compression brake, also called a "Jake Brake", named after the Jacobs Brake which is an air driven cylinder that increases the air compression in an engine cylinder, that when released, causes the engine to slow the truck down.

The brake shoes look brand new.  Here is a picture of the old brake shoes next to the new ones - the old ones are on top:

As you can see, the thickness of the brake shoe is almost identical.  These old shoes have 475,000 miles on them.  Hard to believe, but it's true.  The drive axle brakes were replaced last year and were in the same condition; barely used.  The trailer also has these brakes, and they too are in very good condition.  The fact is, that if you use your engine brake correctly, you can get one million plus miles out of a set of brakes. 

So why am I replacing them?  At first glance they look fine, and one of them IS fine.  But here's a closer look:

Can you see it?  Here's an even closer look:



If you click on the picture and make it larger, you'll be able to see a crack in the pad.  This is an automatic fail on a DOT roadside inspection.  If that happens, you'd have to get a certified mechanic to come out and change the brake shoe at the inspection site, which means unnecessary down time, and is one of the reasons why routine inspections are so important.  Even though the shoes have hardly any wear on them, they still get old and sometimes the just start to break down. 

Brake shoes don't like heat.  Neither do wheel seals.  Typically, new drivers will drive their trucks as they would their cars.  This is a tell-tale sign that a newbie driver is behind the wheel.  Trucks require greater stopping distances, and slow travel when going up and down hills, which I'll get into in a later post.  The point is, when drivers use their brakes constantly, they generate tons of heat which causes the wheel seals to prematurely wear out and leak.  Often, they even catch on fire. 

So when you see a truck or trailer with billowing smoke coming out of the wheel areas, it's almost always brake related.  This isn't always the driver's fault, as sometimes the brakes will come out of adjustment while driving, as the result of a bad slack adjuster.  I'll cover that  topic in another post also.   

After the cracks were found, the brake drum was then removed.  It took a while to do this because this brake drum was installed at the factory in August 2006, and has never been taken off the truck before.  Because of that, the mechanic had to beat on the drum with a mallet to loosen it up.  Eventually, it came off  and the brakes were replaced.

The drum was in new condition, so they just slid it back on the hub, followed it with the wheel, and in no time at all I had new brakes. 

As a result of taking 15 to 20 minutes to do a proper pre-trip inspection, I not only saved myself from getting a possible DOT violation and points on my CSA, but I also knew that the safety of my vehicle was intact before I got back on the road. 

Routines, Routines, And More Routines

Today I walked around my truck and looked at everything. This is a normal routine for a pre-trip inspection. As a driver, you are responsible for maintaining the vehicle so it will pass inspections given at weigh stations along our routes. It's important that you catch anything early enough to do something about it. By anything, I mean just that, anything. You look for bolts sticking out of your tires, fluids leaking on the ground, loose securement devices on your load, loose wires sticking out, broken glass, broken plastic lights, and broken suspension components.

Typically you can see most major problems during a walk around inspection. I have a tire pressure monitoring system on all of my wheels so I don't have to take tire pressure readings everyday manually; the system does it automatically every 5 seconds. There's a long list of items that have to be checked and tested every day. I check under the hood every time I fuel, looking for leaks, broken bolts, low fluid levels, and anything else that looks out of place. Most of the time I catch the problems before they become worse. Vibrations that come from the engine and the road can wreak havoc on everything. From hose clamps, to fan belts, to every nut and bolt, the vibrations affect the trucks in such a way, eventually everything wears out.

Managing these vibrations is the key. The best practice is to keep a new vibration damper on the crankshaft, new engine mounts in between the engine and frame rails, and new vibration absorbing polyurethane bushings on all vibration creating components. Polyurethane bushings last longer then rubber and dramatically reduce vibrations throughout the truck. In addition to the bushings, new shocks need to be installed every couple of years along with any air bags that add to the suspension.

If you keep up with the walk around inspections and with replacing the key components that wear out, you can keep the truck lasting for years and years.

Running Fast or Slow

I have been doing this job in this career for about 15 years now and I have driven almost every make of truck. In saying this, I also say that the maintenance costs go up when you drive over 60 mph. There are statistics that back this up, but my first hand experience is what I am here to post about. I had a 1997 FLD 120 with a very bad problem. The truck had around 1 million miles on it when I decided to have the suspension springs replaced on the whole truck. OOPS!! WHOOPS!!

What a mistake I made as it turned out. The team that installed the springs was supposedly the most experienced team in the state and they managed to install the axle seats backwards on my front drive axle. This in addition to the fact that the truck had too many shims in between the carrier bearing and the bottom bracket of the truck. This caused the drive shaft to go down as it came out of the back of the transmission and up into the front differential. The angle of the drive shaft was very out of whack. I drove the truck for 300,000 miles this way and never drove faster than 60 mph.

The truck lasted two years with this faulty configuration until I had a load that needed to be expedited and so I ran 70 mph. in as many states as I could legally do so and that is when the transmission shaft failed forcing me on the side of the highway. So I successfully ran 2 years and 300,000 miles with a very poorly aligned drive shaft because I kept the rpm's low and the speed under 60 mph. I am not proud of the poor configuration that the drive line was in, but I had "experts" look at it with decades of experience and impeccable references from many people that I trusted. They turned out to be wrong in the end, but I learned a valuable lesson about how to to run a truck.

Slow down and save yourself a bundle on maintenance, fuel, and out of trouble with the law.

Eighteen Wheels to Ten

There is an old trend emerging again in trucking. Super single tires are replacements for dual tires on heavy trucks. They are supposed to lighten up the truck and/or trailer as well as being more stable on the highway and bring the fuel mileage up. I have talked with about twenty different drivers who have hauled several different types of trailers and the popular opinion has been that they don't really add that much to the fuel mileage. They also are less stable in wet weather with a tendency to lose traction all together on a very wet road.

The other downside is that if you have one tire and it picks up a nail and goes flat then you are stuck waiting for the roadside repair truck to come and get you back on the road. I would hate to be stuck on highway 50 in Nevada over a hundred miles from anywhere with possibly no cell phone service and have a flat tire that I couldn't fix or even limp up the road with just because some nitwit dropped a board with a nail in it out of his or her pick up for me to run over. A road call for a situation like this could range in the thousands. Yikes! Hardly worth all of the savings they are supposed to be offset with.

Super singles are being used on gasoline tankers and I am seeing them being used more on flatbeds and some dry vans. These types of tires are more dependable than their former models from thirty years ago and from what I have seen, many large carriers are using them more and more. I don't see too many owner operators with one or two trucks using them and I can't see how they would ever benefit from their use unless you were running the same corridor everyday and had constant access to the truck for inspections.

MONEY=GONE

3 transmissions, one driveline, and 2 differentials later.......

My transmission went out, so I called a shop that claimed to be a professional shop. They arranged to tow the truck as stated in previous posts. The shop tried to pull some shenanigans and keep my truck locked up in their shop for hurricane Gustav. A shop that flooded during hurricane Katrina. Upon discussing the storm, it was decided that we would leave with the truck to shelter it from the storm and so that I could have real professionals look at it. I did just that.

After the manufacturer of the truck got their hands on it, they found within 30 minutes of diagnosis that the driveline angle was way way off. This is something that the previous shop should have noticed. This is also the cause of the noisy driveline and most likely the cause of the failed transmission. Because this shop misdiagnosed so much with this truck, further investigation will occur before a determination is made in regards to the condition of the front differential. After the transmission was replaced, the truck was checked at a shop across town and no metal shavings were present in either of the differentials.

Since the first shop I took it to that worked on the truck didn't know what they were doing, it is possible that thousands of dollars were spent chasing a noise that was not properly diagnosed so money=gone