How to Back Up a Tractor Trailer (+ a Great Trucker Story)

I'm from a generation that learned to drive trucks from their fathers and their grandfathers older guys that have been doing that for years and it was a great way to learn it was the best way to learn these days they don't allow that anymore and more and more jurisdictions you've got to go to truck driver training school or a course or something like that and you know I thought you know well that's that's okay I guess that's one way to learn but my biggest problem with them was that they gave the drivers no seat time there was tons of class time virtually no driving time and that's that's how you learn to drive these things it's not from sitting behind a desk reading a book you know these CDL schools are not to train these guys to drive these CDL schools are simply to get the guy through getting his license and that's it so one of the hardest things with driving a truck is backing up and I see all sorts of new guys doing it wrong so I've cut my my little toy trucks here and I thought I'd try to try to illustrate the right way and the wrong way to go about just backing in between two other trailers it's it's pretty simple stuff but for guys just learning it's it's a real challenge and I'm gonna use the toys to illustrate it because the angle I want to show is from above the trucks so you guys can see where the truck and trailer are at any given time because that's the position you're after really to have a successful back in so we're gonna we're gonna film it from the air and I'm going to illustrate my point is today the right way in the wrong way and why that is one of the most important tricks if you're going to back into a hole is setting the truck up properly so one of the big mistakes I see a lot of the new guys doing is they'll approach a hole this way they'll come at a 90 degree angle right across in front of where they want it back into and then they'll try to jackknife it around into this way and that that type of maneuver works well for Sun trucks you've seen real Sun trucks that the guy walks in a sliding glass door at the back the fifth wheel raises up and picks up the trailers over the landing gears off the ground and he just pivots and Bin's and dumps it in the hole and that works great for that type of truck but a highway truck is not that type of truck at all so the problem with doing it like a shunt truck like this guy is setup here now is because he gets here and then he's literally got a crank the cab around before he starts hitting the hole but as the truck travels this direction towards towards the hole he's got an incredible blind spot on this side and this is this is gonna be the edge of our road for just for the sake of illustrating the point but he's got a huge blind spot here his passenger side mirror shows nothing his driver side mirror shows the face of the trailer and that means Lemmy their mirrors doing him any good and the problem is you get impatient four-wheelers that that may be sitting here parked waiting for the truck to move but they don't realize they're in your road or you get some guy that wants to get past you on the street he's a patient he's sitting up here you can't see either one of these cars at this angle you've got an incredible blind spot and also from where you're sitting here you can't even tell when you're spinning it around like this if your trailer corner here isn't crunching this guy's past in your side fender the visibility is so bad here that it's a real problem another problem is that when you end up getting up lined up with the hole you're up against the curb on this side so that's just the not the right way to approach an angle back like this rather than doing 90 you're better to do it at a 45 degree angle so as you're coming up to the hole instead of pulling straight ahead pull it out and try to set yourself up in a better spot so your ear is close to a 45 as you can get to the spot and then you can start carving and you're able to see that you've cleared this guy's fender you're able to see from this mirror where the edge of the road is still now you've still got a blind spot back here and that's why it's important to get out and look and there's no substitute for that hopping out a couple of times to make sure you don't whack this trailer but your angle has already been here and then if you need to you can you can pull ahead and straighten up or you can adjust accordingly until you get it you know where you want in the center of the hole and something else that's good to remember here is when you're cranking it around like this I always backed into a hole with my doors closed because you open the doors it makes a wider especially with a reefer like I used to pull the doors can be six eight inches thick but it just gives you better visibility there's less chance of catching the trailer door on the guy's bumper and rip on the trailer door off so I always backed in first with the doors closed made sure I was in the center of the the spot that I wanted to be and I would pull ahead open up the doors and then back and it's great again but that's that's a better angle to approach it at is from a forty-five than from a ninety like that just because it eliminates so much of the blind spot here if you're if you're at an angle like this you're at the 45 if there's a car sitting here you can see them in your pass here with mirror so there's there's a whole lot less of a blind spot there and it just it'll work for you better and it'll get your steering axle farther away from the curb and that gives you some maneuverability and some some room to jiggle back and forth to adjust the trailer as it goes in the hole so it's just just a better way to approach a hole than coming out it straight and then trying to jackknife it around and in now while we're talking about this I should I should talk about spotters all sorts of guys will hop out and try to help you and they'll be waving and you get distracted watching these guys they'll be waving you back and forth half the time you don't know what their hand signals mean but half the time you've got a spotter standing here but he can't tell what's going on over here either he can't see any better than you can sometimes he's worse in a worse spot than you are so I tend to completely disregard spotters there'll be guys that hop out and try to help or want to help I just ignore them it's my job to figure out exactly where the truck and trailer is and if I got to get out and look five times I get out and look five times there's no shame in getting out and having a look to see exactly where you are first all sorts of shame and ricocheting off another guy's rig that's the embarrassing part so take your time get out and look as often as you need to check as often as you need to because you don't want to have any sort of an accident you don't want to come into contact with anything else at all period and something else you need to do when you're backing up when you're going into some spot you don't know walk in have a look at the whole deal figure out how you're gonna set yourself up before you go in and if it looks like you're gonna have to blindside figure it away around that I've backed in off the street in and around rather than having the Blind Side in because I drove in I would back in off the street take a little longer but when push comes to shove blindsiding is a tough deal for anybody no matter how long they've been at it so if you have to backin off the street to avoid blindsiding do that and when you park it on the street and go in and survey where you're going to be backing in do check the door that they've given you you're looking for all sorts of other obstacles fire hydrants light poles employees cars look for anything that might possibly be in your road because you may lose it in your mirrors but if you know it's there and take a mental picture of the spot you'll remember that there's some idiot left is jeep right here even though you can't see it you know it's there and you've got to watch out for it so take a mental picture and have a good look even examine the door make sure there's nothing between the last five feet of the door and the door just so you don't hang up and tear your mud flaps off or on a tire chock or something like that check the whole area have a good look at it before you back in again you don't always have the choice but it's a whole lot better to back in in the daylight than it is in the dark sometimes if you get to a shippers he's already closed I prefer to back into the hole in bed down right there rather than try to creep into the hole at 5:00 in the morning when the place is surrounded with employees cars and you can't see what you're doing sometimes you're better to back in in the daylight and go yep I'll call it a day right here need cooller anytime I get into a maneuvering story or a lesson I I still think about the time that my friend Murray and I were in Old Montreal we were unloading we were right in Old Montreal right downtown and we got in there in the wee small hours of the morning and unloaded and that was fine and but by the time we were empty everybody come into work and they parked their cars all over the street both sides of the street anywhere they could park and they just you know on corners beside stop signs beside fire hydrants they didn't care where they parked they just parked everywhere so when it came time to leave with all these cars parked down both sides of the street Marie and I didn't have enough room to maneuver to swing and make the corner route to get out and we we jockey back and forth Marie was in front of me we could only go one at a time and he jockey back and forth and back and forth to try to get the angle to get around the corner he figured out that we just couldn't do it we couldn't get out these cars were in the road and we hadn't been able to find who owned the cars we were just trapped there it was looking like this is you know like eight or nine in the morning and it's looking like we might have to sit there until five or six o'clock at night till these people go home we can't afford to sit that long but Old Montreal was so tight and these people park wherever they wanted that we were jammed Murray nosed up got around the corner as far as he could but the trailer duels on the passenger side just weren't gonna clear this one car Murray said keep an eye on me on the on the CB radio I don't want to damage my trailer and he went around the corner and the the back trailer axles went up both the front corner of the car came back down again and and crashed the corner of the car the moment I I thought that to myself here comes a cop I thought oh we're just going to jail we're in Quebec we're going to jail so the cop gets out looks at the car Murray meets him at the back of the trailer I meet him at the back of Marie's trailer and thank god it's an English cop in Montreal just just a fluke just our luck and Murray says to the guy we've been trying for an hour to get out of here it's the only way we could get out of here we look for the owner we can't find anybody nobody will come cop looks at where all the cars are parked and says you're not supposed to be parked there anyway you're good on your way I'll deal with the car owner when he comes out at 5:00 we went we couldn't believe our luck so Murray continued on I made the corner I ended up pulling the guys bumper off with my my dual and off we went we thought oh man you'd never find a better cop than that that's how we got out of Montreal we had to literally run over this car to get it back out to the street but glad I never had to repeat that process more than once anyway take care keep the rubber side down try not to nail the cars on the corners and I'll see you on the back home [Music]

Channel: Smart Trucking

Views: 950,688

Keywords: big rig photos, semi trucks, semi truck photos, trucking industry, back up a tractor trailer, how to back up a tractor trailer like a boss, backing up a semi truck, alley backing semi truck, setting up for a dock, trucker tips, truck driver tips, truck driving skills, trucker skills, truck driver skills, cdl skills

Id: SqbVOxsPZkQ

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019