On a brighter and sunnier day, it was time for another attempt at taking the recycling to the recycler. The truck and trailer were still all hooked up so all I had to do was to make it there in one piece. I had new tires on the bad side of the trailer and all the air pressures had been checked properly this time. Funny how with proper prep things work out.
This time the trip over was pretty uneventful, other than it was a really heavy load. I was curious to see what the whole rig weighed when I got there.
Almost 40,000 pounds. That’s truck, trailer, and load. The max GVWR of my truck is 33,600 so that is 5,800 overloaded. Now we are licensed to carry up to 67,000 pounds so we weren’t illegal, just overloaded. To put the amount of overload in perspective, that means we were loaded with the equivalent of 5 Suburbans on the trailer instead of the four we thought we were carrying. Oops. It’s not like we have scales on the farm to check these things with. I think the cardboard had absorbed some water from all the rain so next time we know to just load dry bales and we should be ok. I hope.
Unloaded weight, which means we dropped off 20,840 pounds of recycling or four Suburbans. Not bad for a couple of months worth of work. Since the truck should weigh about 8000 pounds, that means our big trailer weighs in at 10,000! It’s supposed to weigh 8000 so no wonder that thing is so heavy to carry. At least now we know our weights on these different vehicles so we can plan better going forward.
And what we earned for the cardboard paid for the tires and fuel. That’s a lot of work to break even. Oh well. Some days you eat the bear. Some days the bear eats you.
Part 2?
I have no idea how, but I published these out of order. I just kicked #2 in the pants and made it live so everything is published now. Sorry about that.
🙂