Almost 2 decades ago, i took some years away from my certified profession of electric stuff to operate heavy machinery at an industrial site. Wheel loaders and excavators to be precise. Fun stuff, you get paid good money to play around with big yellow toys.
One of the tasks was loading building rubble on to trucks. Concrete bits, dirt, bricks. Heavy and dense stuff. I don't remember exact numbers, but i think we put around 14 tons net weight on the truck, and 20 on the trailer, it being lighter.
I handled many trucks a shift, and all drivers were nice folks. With an exception, hence this story.
The loader i was driving was a volvo L110, lifting capacity 11 tons including bucket, which was around 2 tons. So 9 tons left for the materials if full. And the usual load was 2 not-quite full scoops on the truck, and 3 on the trailer. Or therabouts.
Enter our antagonist, the truck driver. Drives up along the ramp, and walks up to me. I open the cabin door to ask how much to load. Him: "4 on the truck, and 5 on the trailer"!!. Me: umm, isn't that a bit much, we usually do 2 and 3??
He snaps back, "I SAID 4 ON THE TRUCK AND 5 ON THE TRAILER!!!"
Closing the door again, i thought, "who am i to tell you what's good for you and your truck, you clearly know best". Demand and you shall receive.
So i drove around the site to the rubble pile, and instead of gently filling the bucket as usual, i drove it into the pile as far as i could while tipping up to really fill it. Then tipping it back and shaking it to pack the stuff, and proceeded to repeat this a second time.
Rated lifting capacity was 11 tons. What the loader would actually lift was a different matter. I had at least 11 tons of material alone, the machine barely had any weight on the rear wheels.
After gingerly driving back to keep the rear wheels on the ground, and tipping it into the truck, i repeated the process at least twice more. I can't remember how many shovels i got into the car and trailer before the driver was back, red in the face and practically screaming.
Details of that conversation have been lost to time, i do know he had to drive around site and dump all of it off before i loaded him up again. Less material this time.....
*edit: spelling
I once watched a guy at one of the big box stores berate an employee for not using the forklift to load paving stones onto his pick up truck bed. Decided to stick around because I knew it was going to be interesting. Demanded a supervisor who said the same thing; load was too heavy for the truck. He insisted, they had him sign paperwork verifying this was his decision to have this done, forklift lowered the pallet of pavers onto the truck bed and the shock and horror on the truck guy's face was so worth sticking around to see.
You'd think them having you sign a waiver would be a big red flag that maybe you should rethink things a bit. But nooooo.
It is known: if someone says "can I get that in writing", stop and reassess
Sadly, it's only known by the people who would have listened without the waiver.
The waiver is not effective as a deterrent -- it's only good as CYA.
Yeah. And sometimes, you're still right. But those stories don't end up on THIS sub 😆
Sometimes they end up on Petty Revenge.
Indeed 😂
When the universe asks 'are you sure?', think carefully before answering.
LOL. In the Bible the Israelites wanted a king. God warned them about the bad stuff that would happen and then asked if they still wanted a king. Seems to me that if the all knowing creator of the universe says it's a bad idea, it probably is (spoiler: Israel got a king).
To be fair old testament God was a pretty awful deity as well.
Christian Nationalists: “I don’t see the problem here”
Man lot loaders at home depot have stories let me tell ya
I need to take some of those folks out to a Happy Hour and take down some of their stories!
Unless YOU have some, me bucko!
You'd think them having a waiver in the first place would be a bigger red flag that they know from experience you should rethink things!
He'd gotten too far into the schlop to stop now. He didn't know his idiocy would double . He actually thought the chances his truck could take it were okay. smh
I hadda look up 'schlop'.
I wish I didn't, now.
EW!
Hehe. :)
Yeah, it takes a particular type of arrogance to assume that a company that actually does this every single day wants you to sign a waiver. Maybe assume they know what they’re doing? Especially before you risk damaging a very expensive vehicle. He definitely got what he deserved, but I suspect he didn’t learn the lesson
One of my many jobs was a gate attendant at a lumber yard. I used to be the guy who had to remind people that the store wasn't responsible if they overloaded their vehicles. They already signed paperwork to get into the lumber yard stating as such, but we tried our best to tell people not to ruin their vehicles.
The store wouldn't load a customer up with a fork truck under any circumstances, and employees were required to stop assisting with loading if the vehicle appeared overloaded. And yet people were STILL driving out with "frowny face" leaf suspension in their quarter ton trucks or sedans full of concrete.
The best was when the rental trucks they got onsite were so overloaded that the wheels were ready to blow and rubbing on the chassis. "Sir, I know you think it'll be faster and cheaper to do this in one load but I promise you that your insurance will not cover the cost of replacing the suspension and tires when you go over those speed bumps". I wasn't allowed to physically prevent them from leaving or anything, they signed the waiver, etc. All I was allowed to do was open the gate and politely ask them to return to the yard to adjust the load. They would always just leave and I would watch, and hope, that the truck would just give up... but they never did. At least not while I was watching. A couple times a rental truck didn't make it back and had to be towed. We all tried our absolute best to stop the customers from leaving, and laughed about how dumb they were, but we also honestly felt horrible for them. Thousands of dollars in repairs.
Much as I wish it were different, I cannot refute the assertion that 'You can't fix stupid."
There was enough duct tape, you can muffle the noise.
A 2x3 applied rapidly to the back of the head won't fix it either - but is, nevertheless, very satisfying.
Why is it so hard to listen to people who work at such a place and have probably a bit of knowledge and experience with those things? If such a professional tells you that your plan will probably not work, why don't they listen?
Why? Dunning Kruger Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Amazed you didn’t sell advertising to tow places and truck repair places - billboards just at the exit gate. 🤷🏾🤪
They could argue collusion at that point. Not worth the headache.
They can argue all they want but they are the ones that signed off on the loading so it’s a weak argument that’s going to go into the circular recycling bin.
Still not worth the headache for what would probably amount to very little cash.
It's surprising how much a vehicle will go beyond "rated" load, for short periods of time.
In the 80s, my dad had a 2wd one ton Toyota pickup. That's right, Toyota actually made a one ton suspension back then, but it was really rare. We were picking up material to do hardscaping at our house, basically really finely crushed gravel. The loader was talking trash about my dad's Toyota was a matchbox truck, and and were we sure we wanted to put a ton of gravel in it? My dad decided since we were only going 2 miles down the road, to just do one trip instead of two, and had them dump 1.5 tons of crushed gravel in the back of this toyota. The loader couldn't believe that even with that much weight that little Toyota still didn't collapse. He said something about "guess its stonger than it looks".
A lot of the load rating ends up being about the physical limits of braking.
1000%
Vehicle is rated to carry the load and do all normal functions for the lifetime of the vehicle! Go up/down hills, drive down the freeway, go on a relatively rough road, etc, without any kind of damage whatsoever as long as you never exceed its limits. And I have to assume that the ratings are slightly conservative to make up for manufacturing defects.
So, yeah, most consumer trucks can easily handle 10-20% more than rated. and I'll always eye-roll whenever someone talks about THEIR truck that can go over by a bit. Yeah, they all can. For a while. Until they can't.
Prolly would trust that old Toyota to handle +50% load more than most modern vehicles, though. The beds on some of these new trucks seem to be made of tinfoil
"..."frowny face" leaf suspension in their quarter ton trucks or sedans full of concrete."
I hadda look that up.
Whoa. Just. WHOA.
When you wrote, "...rental trucks they got onsite were so overloaded that the wheels were ready to blow and rubbing on the chassis.", I substituted the word 'frame' for 'chassis' and got another WHOA in my head.
Did you ever have traffic problems from those customers breaking down close by?
They would rent the trucks by the hour and have to pay for miles driven. We didn't have to but we would always mark down when the trucks were clearly overloaded just so that we knew. It was more for entertainment because the job was so stinking boring.
In order for them to have been returned on time, they had to have gone through the gate before the time expired and then the keys had to be returned within something like 5 minutes of the gate crossing. Usually people were 5 or 10 minutes late and the company would generally allow a 15-minute grace period.
Sometimes the trucks would come back an hour or two late and then they would have to pay a lot of money. A few times the trucks didn't return at all and every single time that a truck never made it back. It was one of the times where it was severely overloaded. And then a few days later we would find out that the truck was in the shop because a customer had destroyed the suspension or something
I've seen similar. For my one, nothing catastrophic happened at first. The bed was just real low and creaking. The catastrophe didn't happen until he tried to go over a speed bump, which snapped his leaf springs.
My absolute favorite part was when the guy came back dripping with self-loathing, the employee just said,
"So I guess we'll need to arrange delivery, then?"
BURN!
Especially if he said it with NO condescending intonation at ALL, but just as a very mild query.
I once purchased a bunch of pavers (bricks for a patio). I actually calculated the number of bricks my minivan could hold weight wise - and then cut about 30% from that number. I think I made 5 trips.
Your suspension and frame thank you.
Not to mention your BACK!
I know how people want to 'do in as few trips as possible', not only delivering it home, but lifting it outta the vehicle (onto hopefully a hand truck or cart).
Yeah, you speed up the process, either your vehicle's chassis or YOUR chassis is gonna pay the price.
And god help you and the poor bastard you’re going to rear-end if you end up having to emergency brake with a max or over load.
That's why it's SUCH a learning experience, and reading posts and comments on these subReddits is golden.
You tend to remember.
Many years ago I heard a saying: "Learn from the mistakes of others. You will never live long enough to make them all yourself."
While I certainly can't claim that I've never made mistakes, I've definitely avoided a few by remembering the actions of others in similar situations and going "Wait... this didn't work out so well for them, maybe I'd better try something else instead..."
Absolutely!
BTW, I just found an AWESOME subReddit...
r/Construction
It is SUCH a gas! I gotta tell r/coderjoe
Reminds me of driving a rental van full of my fiancée’s earthly possessions from her place to mine, and running into a traffic jam on the motorway.
I braked… and braked… and braked…
Fortunately, we came to a stop just in front of the next car, not inside it. But I was not used to how much momentum such a full vehicle could have.
Try driving one with large containers of water in the back. The water starts sloshing forward and back with sudden stop/starts and side to side with sharp turns. Emergency stops (thankfully rare if you drive carefully and swap drivers before you set tired) are... Exciting...
Math??!?
You did math??!?
How does that help you develop good stories to share here????
smh.
Sorry. I was a math major in college and I can’t help myself.
Same here.. except that when I realized that I would have to make 4 trips, I decided that my back would prefer if I just had it all delivered
I use my mini van for such trips/purchases all the time. The only caveat is that (since my back is borked) I have the employees spread the load out so it's not all concentrated right over the back wheels. So long as I stay within the car's specs, it's all fine.
ITs a shame they cant really schedule that nonsense.
I would be up for a bit of shopping and a show on the way out the door. Hell, I might even buy some popcorn to enjoy....
Popcorn is ALWAYS a go-to when you're able to watch someone who's insisting on being stupid.
Seen both sides of the axle on a single axle trailer completely kerchowed after loading a full pallet of shingles on it. Same deal, two hourlies and a manager told him no before finally having him sign a waiver and destroying his trailer.
He still drove it off the lot and out on to the main road. Don’t think he made it home though.
I heard a story at Home Depot. Dude wanted lumber I believe loaded onto his Honda accord ?? Like a lot of lumber and same thing….he signed a waiver after everyone told him it was a bad idea…..he pulled off and if I remember correctly, before he got out of the parking lot his tires blew out.
Yep, he went over one of the speed bumps.
It's ALWAYS a pleasure to read one of those posts.
I remember this. Believed it happened in Maryland. There was a photo, and it was insane the amount of items tied down to the roof (Lord knows what was inside). The car was just about flattened on the ground. They made it maybe 1/2 mile.
As I don't have much experience with such things, what happened with the truck? Was it just a low rider? Or did it break in some way?
Honestly I don't know much about trucks but the bed kept going down and it looked like the tires were hitting the top of the wheel well. I heard a couple creaks and bangs but don't know what actually happened. I walked away as the guy was telling the forklift dude to lift the pallet back up. Forklift guy asked 'Are you sure?' which was hysterical.
Ah, so low rider and maybe damage the suspension.
Yep.
You put that VERY well.
I think I have read a similar story in full somewhere on reddit in the years past. It was absolutely glorious.
I’ve seen that happen at the big orange store. I laughed my ass off. Dude was pissed & told me & sone of the others watching to stfu. I said you’re the dumbass that insisted & good fucking luck on reporting this to your insurance company.
A pallet of large pavers show as 3255 pounds (Google search).
Now was the pickup a small ¼ ton or a ½ ton?
A half ton is max rated at 2000 pounds depending on the truck and tires. Some half tons are only good for ½ ton (1000 pounds) due to tires and suspension).
The reason I ask this is was it exciting and the tires popped or did the axle break? Fun times.
What actually happened? So I’m picturing the tires exploding, frame bending, truck bed sides bursting out. I know it must have been catastrophic, but please, what actually happened?
Which is why for $50, I had them deliver a full pallet of paving slabs.
I had a loader shocked, when he put a pallet full of stuff in my truck bed, and it only went down a couple of inches. There's trucks, and then there's heavy/super duty trucks.
I put about 500lbs of paving stones into my car (VW Golf) a few years back, and starting driving home. Took a while to get up to highway speed (OK I guess), then there was a slow down in traffic .. and that's when I discovered that your stopping distance GREATLY increases with added weight. I drove even more conservatively after that.
That kind of experience is worth it's weight in GOLD.
You tend to remember those things (and associative applications of the law of inertia aka mass).
I think this particular experience was worth it's weight in paving stones. Gold, being heavier, would have taken up less space. Might have fit more weight in there!
Italian Job vibes.
I had the same issue but it was a 2 mile drive in a 20 year old F150 and about a ton and a half of concrete debris.
Same concept applies when driving on snow/ice. Getting up to speed is not as important as knowing your stopping distance.
Was he used to a different size loader or something?
Could be, these drivers hauled stuff between lots of different places and maybe he was used to a smaller machine elsewhere. I hadn't seen him before. Or since, for that matter. 😆
And since there were many different trucks with different axle configurations on both truck and trailer, we'd do this thing called a "nice conversation about how much and where in the truck/trailer bed to put it". Most drivers were quite experienced and knew exactly how much, and the new folks we helped along as best we could, trying to make everyone's life easier. All in all a pleasant bunch to work with.
The where part is interesting - makes sense there'd be a best spot, but I'd never considered it
As a complete idiot layman, I assume it has something to do with weight distribution. Maybe like, "mound it up over the axles".
No, a complete idiot would laugh at the idea of sweet-spot distribution and also insist on overfilling regardless of what anyone tells them. (as per OPs story and many of the similar-story comments)
You're thinking about where it might actually be.
*pats self on back*
Yeah, I sounded in my mind, "the sweet spot".
Sounds like a classic case of “you asked for it, you got it.” You basically let him experience exactly what overloading feels like, natural consequences in action.
He FAFO 🤣
"...you get paid good money to play around with big yellow toys."
I LOVE it!!
That would be SO COOL.
EDIT: "So 9 tons left for the materials if full."
OP, does that mean if it went over 9 tons, you'd tip the loader backwards?
EDIT #2: " I had at least 11 tons of material alone, the machine barely had any weight on the rear wheels."
OP, (in the voice of Gilda Radner's SNL character Emily Litella) 'Never mind!'
There's a place in Vegas that lets you play around with it. We skipped it because it was kind of pricy but is on the maybe list in the future.
Tow a 4000 lb car with a 3800 lb light truck. Tow bar rated for 8,000. Overkill. No trailer brake, a mistake. It was quick n dirty, get it to the garage. Tried to take a corner a little fast, the car pushed the truck's ass end around, nearly jackknifing. No harm, nearly kinked the receiver and bar, but didn't.
My dad retired as a truck driver. The last thing he ever wanted was an overloaded truck. For one it wasn't a fun fine to pay and it was his responsibility to pay not the company as he was in charge of loading the truck and staying under weight. Second was he could be parked until he met weight and if that meant waiting a few days for another truck to arrive the weigh master didn't care. He did have a few times where he was a little over weight (hundreds of pounds not thousands) where the weigh master would let him go anyway. Drivers and weigh masters get to recognizing each other and they know who made an honest mistake versus really trying to push things.
Weigh master also doesn't care how you transfer the load from one truck to the other and they don't have equipment sitting around for you to use. At one point my dad was hauling wood chips, one of the drivers had to hand shovel the load off his truck onto the ground until he met weight. At least the company was nice enough to let him use a pickup/trailer to hand shovel the excessive wood chips into instead of making him try and fill an empty semi trailer...FYI weigh stationed was closed and he didn't get the news that it had reopened between loads so was really overloaded.
Big scoops of MC!
Heaping truckload of MC!
Oh to have had a smart phone and it's video capability back then...
Oh, i had my first "real" smartphone at that time, the nexus one from google. Not amazing video quality, but still usable. And not much later i bought a gopro. Got many hours of driving around there on film. Not this story unfortunately.
If I was the company owner I'd have a CCTV. Theoretically to provide evidence to any court cases but practically to laugh at them.