Watch the ends of the straps!!

I was sitting on the hitch of my trailer at a very large national regatta. I had just unhitched and was decompressing after the stress of the drive (20+ years of clean trailer driving, but I rode shot gun on one heck of a trailer wreck early on whose memory still keeps me on my toes!).

As I sat there the next trailer to come into the venue started backing in next to mine. We were in the 2nd row, so their driver had my trailer next to him and one directly behind him to worry about, and everything was looking good until we all (their driver, their spotter, me, and quite a few other folks that were milling around) heard a really sickening composite crunching sound. The driver jammed on the brakes and we all ran between his trailer and the other two....nothing! There was no contact at all between them and either of the trailers, meters of space. "Go figure" we all unwisely said and they kept backing.

Sure enough the crunching started immediately and this time there came a vow to not move again until the source was found....and it didn't take long. The tail on one of the straps on a lowest level single on their trailer had come unwrapped. It was out on the "open" side with nothing near it so no one was watching that side. The tail end had been flapping and dragging down the road for quite a while and was quite frayed. As they backed, it lay limp on the ground in front (formerly behind) of the trailer tires, and eventually as the tires "consumed" the slack in the strap they began to synch down on the buckle, tightening the strap to the point where it was cutting into the shell. By the time they figured it out the shell was nearly cut in half. The protruding end was jacknifed up into the shell above it and the strap had dissapeared into the composite.

So close....those last few feet were the most deadly of that trip.

Matt Hopkins,
Niskayuna High School

A funny thing happened on my way across Tennessee.
Recently I was driving home from a camp in the middle of Tennessee and came across a crew trailer heading home from Oak Ridge with a flat tire.

The trailer had just had the blow-out and I came to them before they had gotten the tire off. The driver was digging for his jack and I offered the following advice. "Hey, why not just drive up on your wheel chocks and get that blown tire off the ground?"

He looked at me and said "You know that I have driven trailers around this good green earth for nearly 15 years and have had my share of flat tires and this is the best idea I ever heard!"

So we broke the nuts off the flat, backed the trailer onto the chocks (8x8 with a wedge) took off the tire, replaced the spare and had him on his way west within 5 minutes of getting out of the truck. No digging for a jack, No getting under the trailer, No danger of having it slip off, No skinned knuckles, just slick.

Mark Wilson

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