commando1
Old Man with a Hat
Phhhtttt.... Another guy with a numb fingertip, gets workers comp and then a 350k settlement. I ran into these sandbaggers day in and day out.
So you wanted to be a owner operator
- Thread starter 70bigblockdodge
- Start date
LocuMob
Fluid Technician with a hat
Sorry Stan, he was permanently disabled and has severe back issues now. He wasn't a pussy before the accident.
commando1
Old Man with a Hat
Of course I don't know the extent of his injuries. He may well have been permanently injured.
What I said earlier was based on 35 years of personally getting mangled, bashed, and crippled with injuries while watching guys go on permanent disability because of a boo-boo.
Of course, I can barely tie my shoes now but that's neither here nor there.
70bigblockdodge
Old Man with a Hat
Slip on. Laces are for kids
Comes a time when 10-13 days out looks worse than delivering into a store, you make your choices. Nowadays with E.L.D. a punch in, ,punch out job is looking pretty good.
LocuMob
Fluid Technician with a hat
I understand where you are coming from, I thought you were be specific, then later realized you were generalizing. My bad.
72Fury
Senior Member
That is a good one!
I think movers have it the worst. I can not imagine having to pack all of that stuff, carry the furniture, and then pack into the cab with other movers for hundreds of miles.
commando1
Old Man with a Hat
Super high turnover rate.
Don't they just hire local day laborers for the humping now?
bigmoparjeff
Senior Member
Boy, that's some bad bad luck, but I think you're still in better shape than me. I passed the $50K mark on my Sterling last year, and I'd be lucky to get $15K if I had to sell it. It still needs another $15K in repairs that I'm probably not going to do if I can get away with it. I know it needs a radiator, it probably needs a charge air cooler, the power divider has issues, the Jakes don't work right, and I suspect that it's getting due for injectors too. I have to make it through the end of 2019 to say that I at least got my money's worth out of it. If the outlook for trucking is still looking good then, it will be time for a newer, or possibly brand new truck. I screwed up buying this one because I missed some problems that I should have seen when I checked it out. It looked good on paper: 400K on a factory CAT reman engine, rebuild tags on the trans, both rears, and the power steering box, all for $8000. I figured I could do some minor stuff and run it for a year while I look for something nicer. What I missed was some serious structural rust on the framework that the cab and sleeper sit on. The worst of it was hidden behind the air tanks and wasn't obvious until I had it apart and pressure washed, but I should have spotted the rust starting to come through further back where it was visible. My second mistake was to fix it. I should have covered it up with mesh and roofing cement, and just done the absolute minimum repairs to keep the truck mechanically safe so I could run it and make enough money to buy something better. Instead I turned it into a restoration project that cost way too much money and took way too much time. It wouldn't have been such a mistake if the truck had a different engine, especially a Series 60, but this C12 is real pile of junk. I won't condemn all C12's, but this particular one is noisy, it's rough, gets poor fuel economy, and hates cold weather. The truck came from Canada, and I don't know how the previous owner dealt with this thing up there in the winter. Of course it's a completely different story when bobtailing, which is what you do when you test drive the truck before you buy it. You need to attach a trailer for it's bad side to come out. I do plan to bring it to Pittsburgh Power some day to have the computer reprogrammed. It probably has a lousy, low NOX program in it right now, that came with the reman engine.
This is after some sandblasting, then re-rusting from the damp air after a couple weeks. The spots I should have seen. The rear 3 feet had already been patched, which I didn't notice either.
The air tank that hid the real bad stuff.
The bad stuff after poking and banging.
More bad stuff.
The offending metal removed.
The new part fabricated. Of course it's an odd size, so you have to make up a C channel out of two L channels. More work and more weight.
New metal installed.
Jeff
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bigmoparjeff
Senior Member
Ouch x 1,000.
Question to you O/Os: Everytime I thought of quitting my job because a good opportunity for a lucrative contract popped up, I ran the numbers and it always made more sense if I chose to lease from someone like Penske or whatever.
As you see, I never went that route but why dont you guys lease?
Oh, btw, every one of those easy peasy lucrative dedicated route drop n hooks evaporated after a few years leaving those o/o's up the creek with huge payments and no loads.
Those full service leases run around $36K per year these days. You really need to be making strong money to fit that kind of expense into the budget. There's a real numbers guy on You Tube that claims it's the way to go, but he hauls nothing but high dollar midwest freight. The guy that I listen too says it's a terrible way to be an O/O. Too expensive, and you're farming out part of the responsibility of your job to someone else and paying them way too much to do it.
Jeff
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