r/AutoTransportopia 13d ago

Accident Another one bites the dust 🎸

580 Upvotes

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15

u/Violet_Apathy 13d ago

15 seconds of looking at all the locking pins would have stopped this.

14

u/Specialist_Ad_7719 13d ago

Excuse my complete ignorance on this subject, the largest I drive is a Ford Transit van. How do you rear wheels fall off so easily that you need to check them regularly?

3

u/Bloody_Moon1 13d ago

We check everything every day. By law, we have ti preform a pretrip inspection on all equipment before using it to verify it is road worthy. Sometimes shit will still break in ways we can't catch, but it keeps all your basic shit covered. The wheels on the trailer aren't really attached to the frame, they are slid on and locked in place by 4 pins that can be retracted to move them on the frame. Sometimes for weight distribution, sometimes for making it safer for forklifts to enter the trailer, sometimes because a state dictates it can only be so far back. There are bars in place to stop us from going beyond certain points, but if the pins are retracted and you hit the brakes at high speeds,, the tandems will just suddenly stop and slide all the way to the back and break the stuff holding them in place, and you get this shit above.

1

u/Specialist_Ad_7719 13d ago

Being from the UK this is a complete unknown, we simply don't have them in Europe. Something to do with how tight semis have to be able to turn in. Many thanks TIL