What a week

[jaminjim]

Okay, here we go.

This is how not to run. Start the week with a pick up in Circleville, Ohio 80 miles away going to Al. Upon arrival we are told they always order two trucks just in case, and we are number two, so load cancelled $ 99.00. Drive up towards Columbus get load picking up in Lodi area going to Saint Paul, MN. Load offer for pick up in Saint Cloud to Peoria IL. After taking the load offer ( glad to get out of the cold ) They give an offer to pick up after delivery at the same place and deliver back in St. Cloud.

Just as I pull out of the dock I hear a scraping sound, maybe a locked brake get out look around, can’t see anything. ( 4:30am 7 below zero ) Get back in the cab check gages and no charging. Crap get out, no belt. Call dispatch and tell them to get another truck for the 8:00am pick up. Check the book and see that we are only 7.5 miles from dealer, hmmmm, engine temps fine I will see if I can make it to the dealer. Nope 2 miles and starts to over heat pull to the side and call for road service. Man was it a cold three hour wait.

They can see no reason for throwing the belt, okay 265,000 miles maybe it was just time to break. ( While I was in for service the last time I was going to have the belt replaced, but when I found the fuel leak, decided to wait till the next service to replace it. ) the road service bill was a $ 290.00 bill.

Get a load offer picking up 135 miles away going to Canada, don’t want the load but they offer $300.00 bonus to do the load ( we had not even talked to them, or turned the load down ) Must be something wrong with this I am thinking ( turns out it is the bad weather ) but the bonus will pay for the service call. Get 40 miles from the pick up and the load cancels. Can you say annoyed, or I should go home and start out the next day.

Get a load offer picking up in Wi. 97 miles out, and going to Greenville Tn.. Give me full dead head and we will take it. Make the pick up and running down I-94 just into Il. And no belt again. It is 18:00 and we call dispatch, Long and short of it is they won’t let us tow it to the dealer 35 miles north to switch the load, they will only let us switch at the TA, 5 miles north. ( we have lift gate and Pallet jack ) Tow bill is $ 250.00

TA has the belt but the fan pulley bearing is worn. Crap. Slept with six blankets that night. Decide to put belt on in the morning and limp it to the dealer 30 miles North. $ 232.00.Thinking that the first belt lasted 300 miles this one will last 30 miles, I hope. It is Thursday morning and they can’t get to it until MONDAY. We get 7 miles and yep you guessed it.... no belt. Three Hundred dollars to the tow company, and $ 170.00 for the hotel room.

$ 1242.00 to get to a repair place, and sleep. $1084.00 to get the repair done.

When our trip out started like crap we should have gone home and started the next day. The old saying is.... If you start with poop you end up with poop.

 

[jaminjim]

Oh I forgot, to add insult to injury. We got hit with two failures, one for the pick up in Peoria, and one for the laod we had towed to the TA.

 

[jaminjim]

Insult to injury pat duce... While in the freezing cold of the north and truck in the shop we must have gotten three load offers to Florida.

 

[davekc]

Hope it all works out. You certainly had the week from hell.
On the positive side, you know it will certainly get better.

Davekc

 

[jaminjim]

Thanks Dave. But went out to the truck to accept a good load to take us back out on the road, started it up and all is well, come into the house to grab something and Karin says "whats that noise?" I have OGE Thats Old Guy Ears and could not hear it, so I pop the hood and guess whats ready to fall off again? Yep another belt.
Nursed it over to Stoops Freightliner this evening, and we will go from there. Looks to me like the pulley's are not lining up. Maybe there should have been a spacer behind the water pump. Maybe they put on the wrong pump in Wi.

 

[davekc]

Is this a cat engine?

Davekc
owner
21 years
PantherII

 

[jaminjim]

Nope MB 900 280 hp.

 

[davekc]

Not sure if this applies to the MB series or not. On the Cats the upper pulley assembly will bend slightly throwing the belts when the bearings start to go. A bad idler pulley will do the same thing. If the water pump was replaced, they might have not tightened it, or forgot to put the spacers back in?

Davekc
owner
21 years
PantherII

 

[jaminjim]

Thanks for the info Dave, I will check with Stoops in the morning and mention it to them. I'll keep you updated.

 

[jaminjim]

Well they finally gave it there Blessing, the dealer in Wi. left belt debree in the grooves of the pully, which caused it track towards the outside, in turn breakeing down the edge,and finally causeing it's failure. Not counting the lost revenue it only cost a total of $ 2,500.00 ( cleaning the groove was free )

 

[BigRed32771]

Must be something in the aire, 'cause I had a similar sort of week, though not quite as bad.

Started out on Monday AM early, picking up one of those loads that makes you wonder about people: one envelope weighing less than 1 pound. We took it from the Dayton OH area to Pittsburg PA. Layover options were both Canton OH, so we started migrating that way. Stopped for lunch in Weirton WV and got an offer before we could get out of the truck: pick up at 18:00 in Cleveland and take it to outskirts of Peoria. Opted for quick lunch and headed for the pickup. Hit Cleveland in time for rush hour and nasty snow storm which had us crawling on I-480 at about 5 mph for about an hour. Finally got to the shipper about 19:10, only to find that they did lunch from 19:00 to 19:30. Finally got loaded, did the best we could with wet cold truck to put on hazmat placards, and hit the road. Stopped at first service plaza west on I-80 for a bite, and had to replace one placard already torn up by wind. Made it to Peoria with the rest of the placards intact, delivered about 06:00 Tuesday morning, then drove back over to Bloomington to get some sleep at the TA there.

About 4 hours later, dispatch woke us up with an offer for a temp control load out of Chicago area going to Muncie IN, so we took it. Sounded easy, just run into the fringes of Chi-town and head right back out, but that's where things started to unravel on us. I turned on the reefer unit as I got to the pickup, and it raised the temp in the box to the specified temp, then quit and wouldn't restart. I tried several times to get it going again, thinking that maybe I had a fuel filter on it clogging or icing up, but no luck. Had to call dispatch and admit I couldn't take the load. Oh, and as luck would have it, I had accepted a predispatch while on the way (OH to SC), and without the first load I wouldn't be able to take the second either. $2200 worth of load gone. Found the local Carrier dealer and headed over to see what had gone wrong: fuel pump failed and took the fuse with it. Fortunately warranty covered it, and as long as I was in the shop I had them do a routine service that was due (almost $300). We got in fairly quickly, and were out about 20:00 EST, but weather was calling for 2-4 inches of snow overnight in Chicago, and I don't know the area well enough to know where to land for an overnight on the spur of the moment. Figuring south was better with snow coming in, we headed back to Bloomington to the TA, arriving just in time to catch a late dinner at the Cracker Barrel across the road (only ones in the dining room, a first for me at one of those places).

Got up Wednesday morning, and ran over to WallyWorld for some supplies. While in the store we were offered, and turned down, loads going from Chicago to Fargo ND and from Chicago to northern VT. Got back to the truck and had two dispatchers trying to offer us loads. The first one to get through to the truck was picking up in a few hours in Chicago area, real close to where we had been the day before, and then delivering in Jacksonville, FL. Pay was a little low but for a load going toward home this close to Christmas I didn't mind. We pulled out of Bloomington and got as far as Joliet before the Q-comm beeped to tell us that the load was cancelling. We pulled off the road to reconsider our options (and give dispatch a chance to either pull that load out of the fire or find another one close by), then decided we had had enough of Chicago for this year and we were heading south to St. Louis or Memphis. Decided to have dinner with brother and his family in Springfield IL and called to make arrangements, subject to dispatch. Dispatch sure enough called, but with a load to pick up on the outskirts of St. Louis Thursday afternoon and going to Russellville AR for delivery later that evening. So we had dinner and a nice visit with brother Wed evening and then pushed on down to make pickup at StLouis and head for AR. Delivered Thursday evening and then overnighted at the Pilot at Russellville.

Got up early and took a shower, then as we were discussing breakfast dispatch called, even though we were still technically out of service, and offered a load picking up early afternoon in Camden AR and going to Lufkin TX for delivery that evening. We turned it down once for low pay, but they begged and made it worth our while, so we took it and after a quick breakfast headed off. Got as far as Conroy AR before they cancelled the load. Told them we were heading to either Little Rock or Memphis; stopped at the Petro in North Little Rock. Hadn't even gotten out of the truck when dispatch offered a load from Lufkin TX to Camden AR for pickup at 02:00 Saturday AM and delivery later that morning. Sure enough, it was the same company as the previous cancelled load, but moving freight the other way. Problem was, the miles had nearly doubled, and they were offering less pay than we had agreed on for the first load. Turned it down and went in to use the bathrooms. Before we got out, dispatcher was on the phone begging and offering to cover the deadhead miles. I explained that we had already run the numbers and gave her our best price to cover the load; the Q-comm beeped with that price before I even hung up the phone. So we accepted and headed off to TX, arriving about 7 hours early for pickup. Got a recommendation from someone at the shipper about a place to eat, so ran over there for a bit. As we were pulling back into the shipper's lot, the q-comm beeped; load was cancelling for technical reasons. Shipper lady came out and fell over herself apologizing, but I was just laughing at this point. We had already accepted another dispatch for Monday, so we just overnighted at the same place we had just been for dinner, then got up Saturday and made a leisurely drive to the next point, where I'm sitting now at a TA waiting for Monday. This load is supposed to take us within about 70 miles of our new home location, so we'll be parking for the holidays either late Monday or sometime on Tuesday, unless the load cancels on me again.

The good thing about all this is that every load we didn't take, and more importantly, every load that we lost in the early part of the week, was a load that would have put us into the nasty weather that was going on. As it is, we missed driving in most of the snow and ice that was chewing up the southeast and east coast areas. As my wife likes to say, the Lord seems to be watching out for us. I agree with her, but in the back of my mind I also have a running total of the pay we didn't get for this, our last week of the year. Oh, well, barring a last cancellation on this next load, we'll be doing okay for the week.

Doug Simmons
O/O since 1/05.

 

[Tennesseahawk]

I hear that! For Detroit being such a busy place, I had a helluva time getting out this week. Can't watch the board constantly, and missed a couple loads that way. Then there are tons of MI to OH or MI to IN runs, but I wanted a good long one to start out.

Missed a load going to NV Friday morning, which is ok, cause I didn't feel like spending Christmas at a casino. Then later in the day found a load picking up from Plymouth (a couple miles from my house) to Portland, OR. I debated for a long time, then sent them an offer (Christmas wasn't an issue in the NW, since the Seahawks are playing the Colts on Christmas Eve). They wrote back and said they can do it for x amount. It was only a couple hundred difference, but I decided not to do it because of the mountain snow and such.

Luck would have it, I checked the board one more time at 8pm, when I usually stop looking at 6. Found a load from Grand Rapids to Norcross, GA. Got a really good price on it, and picked up yesterday for a Monday delivery. I love Fridays! :7

Only thing bad, other than counting the whole week as a wash, is that the cable snapped on my sidebox, so I can't open it. I'll have to make a panel behind my seat to open it and fix the cable. But I'm thinking about just putting a lock on it.