Overdrive

June 2018

Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info

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Voices channel 19 10 | Overdrive | June 2018 Visit Senior Editor Todd Dills' CHANNEL 19 BLOG at OverdriveOnline.com/channel19 Write him at tdills@randallreilly.com. Failure to note clean inspections seems to have been the norm for Calvin Dahl, owner of a manufactured housing dealer in Washington State. It transports units to customers using three mobile home toters and also some light-duty trucks. Dahl says inspectors find a violation "80 percent of the time I'm inspected." Because Dahl and company haul oversize homes, they're "a big target," watched more closely than most trucks crossing scales. "It's rare that they give me a no-violation inspec- tion," he says. Dahl notes his company's crossed hundreds of scales "without being asked to pull over because they see a violation," he says. If the inspection selection and Compliance, Safety, Accountability system accounted for those clean pass-throughs, then his rating would not show such a high pro- portion of inspections with violations. Counting such pass-throughs is in fact on the radar of enforcement authorities. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance's newish "Level 8" electronic inspection definition has been codified as a North American stan- dard. That greases the skids for doing basically expedited Level 3 (driver-only) inspections as the truck rolls through, with credit for no violations and an op- portunity to automate some of the vio- lation-issuing. CVSA's Collin Mooney confirms that no state is doing these routinely, as the electronic infrastructure to do them is not in place widely. Getting e-inspections will come with tradeoffs for carriers. It ultimate- ly will require the wireless trans- mission of driver logs, among other credentials. Given the exact recording in ELDs and problems that have been raised for some haulers during inspection, that could be a fount of ticky-tack violations indeed. Clean inspections elusive for oversize haulers Former owner-operator and current car-haul company driver Eugene Lep- tien wrote in about a small business he's built. He sees it filling a need he identified after attempting to show his patriotism with a truck-mounted flag. "After 9/11," then-owner-op Lep- tien says he was among Americans who mounted flags on their vehicles. He found that any small flag put on his truck, however, was "shredded in as few as 500 miles." He eventually made a mount that shields small flags during high-speed travel. Having perfected the design over the years, he's launched X50 Flag Mounts. If all goes well, he'll de- vote himself to the business full time. Mounts are designed for trucks (on West Coast mirrors) and motorcycles (a two-piece mount, and the source for most of X50's orders to date). X50 mounts can hold 8-by-11-inch flags and larger 11.5-by-15-inch options. Trucking now for 36 years, Lep- tien, 56, jokes that you might think of the effort as "another thing that a truck driver came up with to try and get away from that ELD." How to protect that flapping flag Courtesy of Eugene Leptien " In Virginia, their inspectors will mon- itor trucks coming into the scale house with heat-sensing equipment [common in many states] that can detect trucks with potential brake issues. If you make it beyond that tech- nology, they rely on two inspectors that are stationed curbside watching every truck crossing the scales, ready to give the signal to pull around back because they visually detected a potential issue. When you have state personnel selecting trucks for CVSA inspection in this manner, there will never be a true and accurate measure of the condition of trucks on the road. " — "Old Feller," via OverdriveOnline.com The custom-designed X50 Flag Mounts are shown here mounted on the breast-cancer-awareness Volvo that designer and trucker Eugene Leptien drives in a car-haul operation out of his Wisconsin home base. With the flag mounts' airflow-con- trolling wing design, "I can get about 50,000 miles out of a set of flags," says Leptien, who runs an 8-by-11-inch flag and a smaller POW flag underneath it. Find his mounts for trucks, motor- cycles and more via X50FlagMounts.com.

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