other dog

can't argue that! I've heard some people say this heat beats shoveling snow too.

These are small coils, pretty easy to haul. They're low-profile, 5 feet wide, weigh a little over 9,000 lbs. each. I criss-cross 2 chains in the front coil, pull the second chain towards the rear of the trailer, chain the middle coil straight across, and pull the 2 back chains towards the front. Then I throw a strap through each one just to have another tie-down, can't hurt. Sometimes we load 2 big master coils going there, they weigh 20+ thousand lbs. each, and are 4' wide, so they sit much higher on the trailer, and require a lot more chaining. I've hauled big singles too, weighing 48,000+, and I put at least 6 chains on those.

Now that really pisses me off too. I don't mind tarping these coils, because they have to be kept dry. If it's raining, or calling for rain, i'll put plastic over them and then tarp them. But when you have to tarp a load of beams in Petersburg that are stored outside, on the ground, in the open, often already wet or covered with snow, that makes no sense to me. They're not going to get wetter just because they're loaded on a trailer. Used to haul treated lumber from a place that was the same way. Had to be tarped, even in summer, though they stored it outside, and where you delivered they stored it outside too.

Good screaming Detroit video there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ABdjNDKgg

just one of them things that are required, like having the beveled wood and rubber mats,all loads must be tarped.

The world is a dangerous place, as seen here- a girl in a car with a cast on her leg, crutches riding shot gun... girl on street with arm in cast... R model wrecker in W.V. Flagger in W.V, rt. 20 between Charmco and Nettie. Rusty bulldozer in Pa. Baby bird in Fairview,Pa. Those windmill blades are still at the rest area!..been a week or more. and here's a girl in a car without a broken leg- Superliner at the shop picking up a load of structural steel. and, especially for Mark the steel hauler, some steel hauling tips- the first thing you need to do is throw a bunch of crap- equipment like this on your trailer. then you set it up so it looks like this- then you get your coils loaded...chain them down. and tarp them ...back in at N.B.Handy, get unloaded, put all that crap away, then go to Moneta and get a load of lumber going to Strattonville, Pa, which puts you in position to get another load of coils in Sharon.

You know something Mack, that is really good thinking. When I was hauling pulpwood for Westvaco, a man with a Ford F-600 was telling Dave,the woodyard manager, one day that he wanted to move up to a tandem or tri-axle log truck. Dave told him that he should stay with the smaller truck because he got all the smaller tracts to cut because all the bigger operators didn't want to fool with smaller tracts of timber, plus he could get into places others could not. Like me- if I called Thompson Trucking for one load of gravel for my driveway, it would cost me an arm and a leg- not for the gravel,but for the hauling,they don't even want to fool with the small stuff. But if I call Mack, with only one single axle dump, he would deliver for a reasonable price and save me money while making money himself.

I'm the same way, I just can't do it any more. I was soaked with sweat after I tied down and tarped a load of steel yesterday,looked like i'd peed in my pants. I drank all the water I had, got another bottle when I stopped at the shop to fuel, then stopped in Chatham and got 2 quarts of Gatorade, drank both of them, and my hands were still cramping so bad on the steering I couldn't even straighten my fingers out unless I used my other hand to do it.

There's lots of local driving possibilities around here, not just dumps but wood and chip haulers are all over. Cundiff Trucking, out of Wirtz, has trucks hauling pulpwood all over the place.You could probably put your truck on with somebody like that, run a load or 2 to Covington a day and do all right.Pulpwood used to pay $11 a ton to haul it from Buckingham to Covington years ago and it was only a little over a hundred miles , of course you came back empty. Of course you could always sell your truck and go to work for F.L.Moore and Sons pulling a flatbed. After working your ass off all week i'm pretty sure you'd ask them where the rest of your money was when you looked at your check!

does Brutus have his own thermostat?

that's it! my brother and I usually got stuck in the loft, but they had a conveyor with a gas motor on it to get the hay to us. we got to stack it in the barn with all the dust and no fresh air.

O.J. Simpson brutally murdered 2 people when self defense wasn't even an issue, and he walked free! Who was marching and rioting then?..that's right, no one. I saw the back of George Zimmerman's head, I feel he was fully justified to do what he did to protect his own life.

Here's another car i've seen at Richmond Dragway. There was another Camaro about the same model- 67,68, or 69- that was called ''Outlaw", I don't know if they were friends, rivals, or even knew each other but they used to put on a great show when they raced each other. They were 10 second cars. I found these pictures on a site called drag racer reunion, or something like that. Lots of pictures from various tracks from the 70's and 80's.

I watched the first new Ice Road Truckers this year, not impressed at all. Then I caught the second one and it was much better. I was looking forward to the third show, but didn't get to see it. Now I saw on facebook that a new guy was going to be on it tonight. I might have to stay up and watch it after checking out this guy's website. Don't know if he's gonna be driving for someone else or driving his own '74 Ford 9000 with the 318, but after looking around his website he certainly seems to be the real deal. Lots of interesting stuff here- http://www.kingofobsolete.ca/index.html

That reminds me of more, we would go get in the Appomattox river to "pre-clean" and cool off. It was only a mile or so away down a dirt road, about knee deep or so, waist deep on the deep side, with a clean sandy bottom, probably about 50' wide. Great times.

yep, when I was 16 or 17 I could throw a bale of hay from the ground all the way over a loaded hay wagon, stacked 37 feets high. Might have been 73 feet high, I don't remember. A man we were helping once told me "damn, if I was as strong as you i'd stand in the middle of the road and stop traffic just to see who I could whip"...now I get tired walking to the mail box!

Reminds me of a story my best friend, the late David Elder, used to tell. He had a Dodge van that he had fixed up pretty nice, had a bed in back...he said he took this girl out one time and parked in some secluded spot in the woods. She was a big girl he said, and when it was time to leave he was stuck. He couldn't get any traction, and he didn't want to ask her to get in the back and jump up and down so he said "I can't find my wallet- would you mind looking in back to see if it's there"? So she did, and he said soon as she got back there he hit the gas and the van came right out of there. Then he said "never mind, I found it"! That van was later stolen, I don't think he ever got it back.

I picked up many, many hay bales when I was a kid, right up until I finished school and went to work. The first thing I ever remember driving was a Farmall C in the hay field, before I even started school. I would just steer between 2 rows of bales while my Daddy and Grandfather loaded the wagon. Daddy would jump on at the end of the field and turn up between 2 more rows, then jump off and load the wagon. We raised hogs and some crops, but Daddy did a lot of work for other people because he had all the equipment- mowers, rake, baler, bush hog, combine- a pull type, IH 80- a mounted corn picker that fit a Ford 5000, and so on. By the time me and my two brothers were teenagers we could run all of it. I liked combining and picking corn, and baling hay. My older brother would rake and I would bale. That was fun, but then we usually had to help get the hay up- I think we might have been part of the deal! My younger brother and I used to help a guy that lived near us in they hay field all the time. His son was a grown man, in his 20's, we were still teenagers, but he always drove the truck and drank Budweiser and we had to stack the hay. His daddy told us "y'all have to stack it, because y'all know how- if Hugh stacked it we'd never get out of the field without it falling off". It wasn't bad at all though because they had a conveyer thing that hooked to the side of the truck, which was a C50 Chevrolet dump truck, and brought the bales up to you so we didn't have to pick it up off the ground and throw it on the truck.

I had just unloaded at Carter Lumber in Reno, probably passed each other somewhere.

I used to go to Richmond Dragway a lot in the 70's, and once in a while to New London and Suffolk. I always liked watching the 10 to 12 second cars more than funny cars or top fuelers. This 69 Camaro was one of my favorites, owned and driven by Wayne Mangum. He used to be at Richmond all the time. Had a big block in it, powerglide transmission, one carb,and ran 9.90's. I heard later he put the running gear in an Opel GT or something, was running 9.30's or 40's but it got away from him at a track in North Carolina and pretty much destroyed the car, never saw him after that.

Not much to say that hasn't been said already, but your health is the most important thing, the only thing, to be thinking about now Mike. Get well soon.

yup, again, those things will kill you. I switched over to tubeless, got used wheels for $40 each. Lot of tire shops won't even fool with the split rims any more.

I remember my Daddy calling any kind of van that had been modified, even a little bit, a "hippy wagon". Some of them were pretty cool though.

I asked the bartender to sit on the bar and show her hose just for you.

hell yeah, I like the yellow one better- you should keep it as your company daily driver-mobile!