Thread: Check your load balance!

Arn't?

Originally Posted by abaddonxi

Arn't?

Maybe they meant "ain't"...

Amn't gunna touch that one.

You see this regularly amongst the earthmoving trade. Not just trailers either. Sometimes quite large trucks are sighted with their front wheels in the air whilst a machine is being inserted into the tip body or tray. A trick I have always thought particularly dangerous is that of loading a machine onto a truck without using ramps.

Originally Posted by abaddonxi

Amn't gunna touch that one.

I isn't neither.

Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm

You see this regularly amongst the earthmoving trade. Not just trailers either. Sometimes quite large trucks are sighted with their front wheels in the air whilst a machine is being inserted into the tip body or tray. A trick I have always thought particularly dangerous is that of loading a machine onto a truck without using ramps.

Up at Yandi, we used to transport D10 dozers around in the back of 785 or 789 dump trucks. Had stregically placed piles of dirt everywhere for loading / unloading.

Simply push a little bit of dirt into the back of the truck, walk the dozer in with the blade up in the air, walk forward as far as you could and rest the blade on the truck's headboard - never a problem.

Then during a bushfire, someone with less experience at doing this decided to move a D10 to where a firebreak was required using a 785. Only he didn't raise the blade and put it up on the headboard - it was left on the floor of the tub, meaning the dozer was sitting much further back than normal. When he got in the truck and took off - literally - the front of the truck went straight up until the truck was resting on its rear tyres and the back edge of the tub, with the dozer half way out of the back holding everything in position.

It was a hell of a job getting everything back on the level (required another dozer to push a pile of dirt up under / in front of the truck to let it down gently as the first dozer was reversed out of the tub. They tell me that there was this unusual "star" shaped crinkly effect in the cushion of the driver's seat of the truck.

Originally Posted by abaddonxi

Arn't?

Yes, I saw it but I didn't create it.

When I was working in Queensland in the 1960s, one of oiur dozer contractors transported his D-6 (I think, might have ben an early D-7) on the back of his disposals GMC 6x6 with a very heavily built tray.

Loading it was easy, push up a pile of dirt and just drive the dozer on. Unloading with no pile of dirt was a little more spectacular - lift the blade tight up, slowly back the dozer until the truck tipped up until the tray or tracks hit the ground, then just back off, allowing the front wheels of the truck to drop back to the ground.

Another contractor travelled round (using back roads) with his Allis Chalmers Dozer towing, linked nose to tail, grader, workshop, fuel trailer, 4x4 Ford F600, spare parts trailer, blade trailer, and finally, on an A-frame, his Mainline ute.

John