We’ve all know the feeling one time or another. The feeling when you are doing something, seeing something, or feeling something that you know is shortly going to cost you money. Being an advocate of performing proper pre-trips on equipment, I pride myself on the lack of downtime I’ve had over the years. Although pre-trips can catch problems before you get going, a periodic inspection during one of my deliveries recently delivered to me a heart-sinking feeling that was too familiar for my liking. When this happened a couple days ago, I thought for sure I was “screwed”!
Nothing alerts a driver more to the fact that they may soon be coughing up money quite like tire issues. If running “smartly”, things like this can be planned for monetarily, but are still not anything we want to see happen. While performing a routine check of my equipment the other morning on my second load, I noticed a shiny piece of metal protruding from the tread of my Michelin X-one XDN2 wide-based single drive tire. This is the moment my heart sunk, as I knew it was probable that it might be a nail or other metal object puncturing my tire. Such
a problem at that point in my day would definitely warrant a trip to my local
tire shop on the other side of town and potentially could cause me to miss out on my third load that day. With surgical precision, I gently guided the foreign object out of the tire with my needle-nose pliers to find out it was an inch-long screw! After using my hand spray bottle of soapy water that I carry in my tools for instances just like this, I was able to determine from the lack of bubbles
that the tire was not punctured. Finally, my heart was able to return to its pre-jolt rhythm.
The incident that morning reminded me of the importance of periodic equipment checks. Sure, it is mandatory to pre-trip our equipment, but checking stuff out on your own throughout the day is just as important too! It is a wonder that when I look around the warehouses that I do not see more drivers out checking things like tires, air lines, and fluid leaks. If not for the sake of decreased downtime, it would also offer a little bit of fresh air and time out of the seat. I try my best to crawl through areas with possible tire-puncturing debris as slow as possible, since reading Henry Albert’s past blog on speed and its increased effect on puncture occurrences. Sometimes these things happen on the open road though, so it is necessary to find these little things and take care of them en-route, rather than ignore them and have the problem snowball on you into something much bigger. Remember, your attention to detail in the caring for your equipment can help prevent you from getting “screwed” later on down the road!