(From October.)
I stopped at a truck stop on my way across Kentucky and noticed a hot dog stand across the highway.
Normally this would mean little--hot dogs are not at the top of my list when I want a nice snack. But this one looked interesting for some reason. So I strolled across and ordered a couple of hot dogs and a drink.
Tiny booth. Doesn't take plastic ("They want 3.5% of EVERY SALE!" he said.) But what the hey, I had cash.
The dogs were okay. The chili on the chili-cheese dog wasn't bad. But the sauerkraut dog--
HE MAKES HIS OWN SAUERKRAUT!
Now, I've had homemade sauerkraut before, and liked it a LOT better than anything I've seen in a store. But it tended to be almost sweet-and-sour. This wasn't sweet. More like the stuff you get in the store.
Done right.
I probably wouldn't like it as much on a plate. But it works very well on a hot dog.
The owner is a truck driver himself. Or has been. And is about to be again, he thinks. He was doing fairly well for a while, he said, but the economy has hurt his local business. So he plans to drive awhile, to save up some capital, to open a few more booths. I hope he gets it over with quick. Next time I drive that way, I'd really like to see him there.
If you happen to take I-64 through Kentucky and pass by Mt Sterling (exit 113), drop by. If he's there, and you like hot dogs, I think you'll approve.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Friday, December 7, 2012
Mind your business
I did say I'd try to catch up here. This is a note I found on the phone from July 2...
Today I unhooked from a trailer in the usual manner. Detached the pigtail and the glad hands*, lowered the landing gear, started to pull out--and heard the pigtail pop loose. I stopped barely in time to keep from ruining the air lines--or worse.
What saved me?
Two things. First, I always pull out s-l-o-w-l-y. And I usually bear left, so I can see the trailer fittings as soon as possible. Paranoia is sometimes a useful thing to cultivate.
Second, I still had the flashers going from when I was checking the trailer lights. When I noticed the trailer lights flashing even though I wasn't hooked to it anymore, a little warning bell went off softly. When the pigtail popped loose I was ready to hit the brakes quick.
How did I get into this mess in the first place?
Well, I unhooked the lines. Then I went back and hooked them up again. Apparently part of me forgot that I was dropping the trailer instead of picking it up. Just did the next thing without thinking about it.
Because I was thinking about something else. Distraction: it's not just for cell phones anymore.
In this case, I was thinking about the relative impact of sociological, political, psychological, and theological factors in the founding of the Roman Catholic Church. Don't ask. I don't know where that came from either. I'm not even Catholic.
I suspect centerfolds are a more common problem in the industry, anyway...
-----
*I occurs to me I may never have used those terms before. Oh, boy. Well, here goes.
A tractor-trailer is way too heavy to stop easily with the hydraulic brakes cars use. Instead, they use compressed air--at something like 100-150 psi. The truck includes an air compressor and big tanks to store the stuff, and a set of hoses to carry air to the tanks on the trailer.
The connectors that join those air lines to the ones on the trailer work under some peculiar requirements. They have to be strong enough and airtight enough to handle 150+ psi of air pressure. And they have to do it in all kinds of conditions--which include a lot of shaking, yanking, and general abuse. But they can't be TOO strong, or they might end up damaging the truck or the trailer in some odd situation (like I describe above) where the air lines stretch a bit more than they should.
In addition, the connectors have to be easy and quick to connect and disconnect. You might have to do it several times in a day, and if you have to have a wrench and plenty of free time--well, let's just say productivity goes down, and finding a way to cheat might be tempting. And cheating on a safety issue is a Bad Thing.
What the engineers came up with was a widget that uses two rubber washers, squeezed together, to form an airtight seal. The washers are squeezed together by metal housings and sheetmetal flanges that sort of act like cams. You put the "washers" together, then twist the fitting. The flanges engage matching fittings on the other connector and the whole thing is wedged into a tight connection--that will nevertheless pop loose if the stress on the fitting gets too high.
Most of the time. It only messes up the truck or the trailer about one time in ten, maybe. Better than nothing, I guess.
Thing is, the "washers" aren't "on the end" of the hoses--they're at right angles, on those fittings. That's what makes them easy(er) to pull apart if something screws up. When you put them together right, it kind of looks like a pair of robots shaking hands. Thus the nickname "glad hands."
Picture below...
This is a view of the front of the trailer, with everything hooked up. The two widgets on the left and right are the glad hands--the blue one carries the air that controls the brakes, the red one carries the air that powers them. (By the way: If the red line fails or the pressure gets too low, a backup system locks the brakes down--the movies always do that wrong. You can have brake failures on a truck, but they don't happen because the air runs out when you're not looking,,.)
That big thing in the middle is the connector for the power cable--the one that lets the truck power the trailer's electrical system. The cable-and-connector assembly is called a "pigtail." I THINK that's because they were using coiled wire for that job long before they could do it for air lines. And for a cable that big it used big coils--curly like a pig's tail.
There. Done.
Today I unhooked from a trailer in the usual manner. Detached the pigtail and the glad hands*, lowered the landing gear, started to pull out--and heard the pigtail pop loose. I stopped barely in time to keep from ruining the air lines--or worse.
What saved me?
Two things. First, I always pull out s-l-o-w-l-y. And I usually bear left, so I can see the trailer fittings as soon as possible. Paranoia is sometimes a useful thing to cultivate.
Second, I still had the flashers going from when I was checking the trailer lights. When I noticed the trailer lights flashing even though I wasn't hooked to it anymore, a little warning bell went off softly. When the pigtail popped loose I was ready to hit the brakes quick.
How did I get into this mess in the first place?
Well, I unhooked the lines. Then I went back and hooked them up again. Apparently part of me forgot that I was dropping the trailer instead of picking it up. Just did the next thing without thinking about it.
Because I was thinking about something else. Distraction: it's not just for cell phones anymore.
In this case, I was thinking about the relative impact of sociological, political, psychological, and theological factors in the founding of the Roman Catholic Church. Don't ask. I don't know where that came from either. I'm not even Catholic.
I suspect centerfolds are a more common problem in the industry, anyway...
-----
*I occurs to me I may never have used those terms before. Oh, boy. Well, here goes.
A tractor-trailer is way too heavy to stop easily with the hydraulic brakes cars use. Instead, they use compressed air--at something like 100-150 psi. The truck includes an air compressor and big tanks to store the stuff, and a set of hoses to carry air to the tanks on the trailer.
The connectors that join those air lines to the ones on the trailer work under some peculiar requirements. They have to be strong enough and airtight enough to handle 150+ psi of air pressure. And they have to do it in all kinds of conditions--which include a lot of shaking, yanking, and general abuse. But they can't be TOO strong, or they might end up damaging the truck or the trailer in some odd situation (like I describe above) where the air lines stretch a bit more than they should.
In addition, the connectors have to be easy and quick to connect and disconnect. You might have to do it several times in a day, and if you have to have a wrench and plenty of free time--well, let's just say productivity goes down, and finding a way to cheat might be tempting. And cheating on a safety issue is a Bad Thing.
What the engineers came up with was a widget that uses two rubber washers, squeezed together, to form an airtight seal. The washers are squeezed together by metal housings and sheetmetal flanges that sort of act like cams. You put the "washers" together, then twist the fitting. The flanges engage matching fittings on the other connector and the whole thing is wedged into a tight connection--that will nevertheless pop loose if the stress on the fitting gets too high.
Most of the time. It only messes up the truck or the trailer about one time in ten, maybe. Better than nothing, I guess.
Thing is, the "washers" aren't "on the end" of the hoses--they're at right angles, on those fittings. That's what makes them easy(er) to pull apart if something screws up. When you put them together right, it kind of looks like a pair of robots shaking hands. Thus the nickname "glad hands."
Picture below...
That big thing in the middle is the connector for the power cable--the one that lets the truck power the trailer's electrical system. The cable-and-connector assembly is called a "pigtail." I THINK that's because they were using coiled wire for that job long before they could do it for air lines. And for a cable that big it used big coils--curly like a pig's tail.
There. Done.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Fish traps
I was going to go for a walk this morning, but it kind of got wet.
"Kind of" is the really annoying part. It's raining--just enough of a mist to make a long walk unpleasant, but not enough to be worth putting anything waterproof on. If I were going somewhere I wouldn't mind--I actually like walking in this kind of thing. But not two or three miles just for exercise. I could use the exercise, but hey...
I've been at this truck stop, on and off, for over a week now. The Company has some customers that expect a stable of drivers to carry just their loads--dedicated accounts, they're called. And the Christmas holiday is stretching some of those stables a bit. So I've become a Dedicated Driver for a month. Which means parking here, near a huge warehouse, and hauling trailers to any of their stores within a 300-or-so-mile radius. Reliable, but repetitive. I haven't made up my mind whether I like it.
One thing about it, I spend a lot of time slipping into store docks in the wee hours. The other night, I was near DC, earnestly following my directions, and sure enough, there was the store. So I pulled in the front drive--and discovered it didn't go straight in. Over the last week or so, I'd noticed that most of these stores had their service drive on the right side, so that's the way I turned.
Not this time.
I got to the end of the drive, looked left, and saw a curb with a car parked in front of it. Then I got out and strolled along the drive. There were four different places where you could turn into the parking lot above me. All four were sized for cars. All four were flanked with shopping cart racks, strategically placed for maximum property damage if I were foolish enough to try slipping in.
Below me was another parking lot. Two entrances were much like the four above (but with trees instead of shopping-cart racks). I might could get through the third, if I was careful. And there'd be enough room to turn around once I got in there.
All I'd have to do is back up a couple of hundred feet.
Backing up on a street is outright illegal. Technically, this was a driveway, so I suppose I might not get arrested--but the laws are there because backing one of these things is a major undertaking. If nothing else, you're never sure when someone will casually pull up behind you, stop, and patiently wait for you to run over them.
There is a whole class of fish traps, in all sizes and made of all kinds of materials (all the way back to the Stone Age, made of sticks stuck in the mud) that work on the same principle: guide the fish down a channel until he reaches a point he can't get out of without backing up. A lot of fish have serious trouble swimming backwards. I'd never thought I'd sympathise so thoroughly with a fish.
Fortunately, this was one of the times that I'd gotten to a store at a reasonable hour. It was open. I found an assistant manager who had a few minutes. He watched the traffic while I backed. And that one entrance was big enough and angled right. Barely. Five minutes later I was around back looking for a dock door. I felt much better.
Then I swapped trailers and swam home.
p.s.
Sorry bout the drought. Now that I have to sit around a little more, I'll try to get a few of the posts I've got sitting on the phone into readable form.
"Kind of" is the really annoying part. It's raining--just enough of a mist to make a long walk unpleasant, but not enough to be worth putting anything waterproof on. If I were going somewhere I wouldn't mind--I actually like walking in this kind of thing. But not two or three miles just for exercise. I could use the exercise, but hey...
I've been at this truck stop, on and off, for over a week now. The Company has some customers that expect a stable of drivers to carry just their loads--dedicated accounts, they're called. And the Christmas holiday is stretching some of those stables a bit. So I've become a Dedicated Driver for a month. Which means parking here, near a huge warehouse, and hauling trailers to any of their stores within a 300-or-so-mile radius. Reliable, but repetitive. I haven't made up my mind whether I like it.
One thing about it, I spend a lot of time slipping into store docks in the wee hours. The other night, I was near DC, earnestly following my directions, and sure enough, there was the store. So I pulled in the front drive--and discovered it didn't go straight in. Over the last week or so, I'd noticed that most of these stores had their service drive on the right side, so that's the way I turned.
Not this time.
I got to the end of the drive, looked left, and saw a curb with a car parked in front of it. Then I got out and strolled along the drive. There were four different places where you could turn into the parking lot above me. All four were sized for cars. All four were flanked with shopping cart racks, strategically placed for maximum property damage if I were foolish enough to try slipping in.
Below me was another parking lot. Two entrances were much like the four above (but with trees instead of shopping-cart racks). I might could get through the third, if I was careful. And there'd be enough room to turn around once I got in there.
All I'd have to do is back up a couple of hundred feet.
Backing up on a street is outright illegal. Technically, this was a driveway, so I suppose I might not get arrested--but the laws are there because backing one of these things is a major undertaking. If nothing else, you're never sure when someone will casually pull up behind you, stop, and patiently wait for you to run over them.
There is a whole class of fish traps, in all sizes and made of all kinds of materials (all the way back to the Stone Age, made of sticks stuck in the mud) that work on the same principle: guide the fish down a channel until he reaches a point he can't get out of without backing up. A lot of fish have serious trouble swimming backwards. I'd never thought I'd sympathise so thoroughly with a fish.
Fortunately, this was one of the times that I'd gotten to a store at a reasonable hour. It was open. I found an assistant manager who had a few minutes. He watched the traffic while I backed. And that one entrance was big enough and angled right. Barely. Five minutes later I was around back looking for a dock door. I felt much better.
Then I swapped trailers and swam home.
p.s.
Sorry bout the drought. Now that I have to sit around a little more, I'll try to get a few of the posts I've got sitting on the phone into readable form.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
