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Old 04-26-2012, 09:22 AM   #2 (permalink)
slowmover
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Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
Posts: 2,442

2004 CTD - '04 DODGE RAM 2500 SLT
Team Cummins
90 day: 19.36 mpg (US)
Thanks: 1,422
Thanked 737 Times in 557 Posts
The alumnum wheels (ALCOA) are rated at 7,300-lbs/ea. Tires are to be run at 95-100 psi, but currently are at 112-psi. The shop says they'll soon have in stock the kind of flow-thru valve stems that will permit rapid checks of the inner tire on dual positions. Last time I went through and corrected all eighteen of a big trucks tire pressure readings it took over 45" of crawling around while at a truck stop at a slow moment in the day. So I'll wait a week or so until those extensions come in as the first PM is still 9,000-miles away.

The trade-off, here, of pressure versus load, is for the very tough lease roads. A bit of "give" is necessary (according to company experience). I'll check the calibration of my air gauge against that of the shop. A PCL brand gauge is something I've wanted for a while. My present truck stop gauge is off by at least 3-4 lbs.

I scraped the fifth wheel one day last week and re-applied fresh grease. The single predictor of a truck jack-knife isn't weather or traffic or driver skill, but a "dry" fifth wheel. Once the jaws are closed on the trailer kingpin, this becomes a steering device. The winds here -- along with a tractor front-end & steering optimized for limited off-road -- make for less precise steering than would be found in a highway only tractor. As the grease ages it takes just that much more throttle or time on the throttle to get the trailer around a corner. Maybe while backing at slow speed, but that would be hard to quantify. Some drilling pads have more room than others, thus some backing operations to the hoppers we either fill or drain can can have extra-tight 90-degree turns. Most of all, a "draggy" trailer is no picnic to smoothly move down the road.

The Driver Information Center screen can be set to tell all sorts of info as one goes down the road. I, up to now, use the Trip Info that tells me about Instant nad Trip Fuel Economy. It'll range up to 30-mpg when all is released, and it is quite interesting to see the effects of winds on this read-out. I might only see 3.7-mpg on the outbound trip, but see 6.6 on the return.

Travel speeds are pretty well set. This is not a dawdle-along-at-55 proposition. A long haul driver on a full day of Interstate driving can have more room to experiment. Our job is to deliver, and as quickly as possible. "Vocational" work trucks, as this is, also include construction types that you would see on any capital intensive job (road building, mining, etc).

I spent a little time with the shop supervisor yesterday. The Cummins Manual tells me that a Re-Gen cycle may take 1.5-2.0 hours, but he said that thus far they're seeing around a half-hour. The driver can control the cycle by shutting it off (1,500F exhaust temps aren't going to be happening on a drilling site), and I plan on manually setting a cycle on a long return leg to see how the question of time works. Having an idea of how it works, how often it may operate, and how long it may take might enable me to predict if whether or not to "run" a cycle to pre-empt this happening while at rest in a place I'd have to shut it off. And then have it go through the cycle again.

As I become more accustomed to the job, and to the different sorts of loads and places of delilvery I'll probably see a more consistent fuel burn and can then try the smallest changes in styles to accommodate a slight rise in the average. I'd like to have one of the better sets of fuel consumption numbers along with other gauges of driver performance that a company tracks. There will always be "better" and more experienced drivers than me. So I'll strive for across-the-board consistency.

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