Pre-trip the light fantastic

The "Pre-trip" is a systematic inspection of the tractor and trailer that one must perform each and every day.

There are something close to 200 inspection points on each rig that need to be looked over every single morning, no matter how crummy you're feeling or if it is raining cats and dogs outside. In truck school, the Pre-trip is one of the things that you learn by rote and have to practice every day. You need this knowledge for the DMV test, as well as for on the job. Before one can qualify for a commercial driver's license, the Pre-trip sequence is something that one must recite from memory in front of the DMV Examiner perfectly. If the hapless applicant cannot recite, define and point to 200 separate truck thingies straight from memory, they cannot proceed to the rest of the test, no matter how well they know to drive a truck.

The DMV is strict on the Pre-trip part of the exam for a very good reason.

"Essentially," the teachers said, "you are piloting an 80,000 pound bomb!" My teachers repeated this phrase over and over. It is a good meme, so I will feign originality and just repeat it here.

So every morning, I get out and check out a bunch of stuff, open the big 'ol hood and look for things that seem out of place, check fluids, check hoses, check belts, look for seepage, leaks and drips, make certain that all the lights work, that sort of thing. This inspection should take about 15 minutes when done correctly; the Company is keeping track of the time that it actually takes. Before doing the inspection, I tell the Qualcomm that I am "on duty" but not yet in "driving" mode. (The Qualcomm always records when you're driving) The Company has immediate access to live data and the Qualcomm machine is telling them in real time just exactly what I am up to. And believe me, they look. Woe to the driver who just starts driving without doing a proper inspection beforehand! No cheating! (The Pre-trip actually takes me only eight minutes, I pick my nose for the remaining minutes)

I am not only doing the Pre-trip just to please my corporate overlords; it is my very own fanny that I am trying to protect. If something has broken loose during the previous days' trip, I kinda want to know about it before I am out there on the road, driving 55 miles an hour and piloting an 80,000 pound bomb down a mountain, for goodness sakes.

I have the same Peterbilt tractor every day, but the trailer is always different. Most days, I usually start out with one trailer and end up with a different trailer. Whenever I hook up to a new (unfamiliar) trailer, I thoroughly check it out: I make sure that it has a solid frame, that all its lights work, that it has current registration and I also make sure to check the air pressure in the tires.

That would be eight tires to check, by the way, AKA "Duals". Usually, anyway. Some of the newer trailers have "Super Singles", which are big, wide, modern tires. Then, you will only have four to check with the tire air pressure gauge.There is no real shortcut, checking the tire pressure one by one is the only way to know that you're safe to roll and that you won't crash your 80,000 pound bomb into a hapless Prius. By the way: checking the trailer tire air pressure is, to put it plainly, a bothersome pain the ass.

So then, you are halfway to your destination and you pull over alongside the road for the night. The next morning, you still have to check out your tractor and look for leaks, drips and seepage, check out your lights and stuff, but you don't have to check the air pressure on the trailer tires with a tire pressure air gauge this time. What you do instead is to use a hammer, walk around the rig and "thump" it on all the tires to ensure that they're holding air and, supposedly, you're good to go.

Now then, while this is the way that I was taught, not everybody agrees with this method. The correct way, the naysayers maintain, is to use an air pressure gauge. Thumping on tires is never a substitute for accuracy, as some clearly paraphrased sources might say.

I had parked for the night in Parma, Idaho, and was doing my Pre-trip the next morning. I walked around the trailer, looking for signs of things out of place, looking underneath the trailer to make certain that none of the previous evening's libation enthusiasts were asleep underneath and I was thumping my hammer on each tire as I went.

I heard "bong, bong, bong, bong...thud".

"Thud" is not the sound that I wanted. I scurried back to the tractor and grabbed my air gauge.  The offending tire only had 25 pounds of air pressure in it when it was supposed to have had 90.

I was suddenly a believer in the "thumping" method. I immediately sent a Qualcomm message to the "On The Road Support" department, and they sent out a nice man who put a new tire on the trailer while I sat and watched.

The really good news is that I had done everything right: I had done my Pre-trip, I had discovered a flat tire before I had departed, not while I was going down a long, steep curve with a 6% grade with a full load in an 80,000 pound bomb. Live another day.