ArcticMonkey:
Never strapped and never got pulled?
Never strapped and luckily never pulled
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Never ■■■■■■■■ a curtainsider unless i feel load has a chance of going over should i need to brake suddenly.
Never been pulled in over 20 years touchwood
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20 years driving and NEVER been pulled?..is that purely luck? Or because youve never given a reason to be pulled?
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Not sure tbh, i think the chances of been randomly pulled are very very low if you look at the amount of lorries on the road everyday to the amount of vosa or whatever they call themselves nowadays
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Add in the fact they’re normally tanking after foreign lorries too…
Ryan the issue I have is the rules are not black and white. If they were I could deal with them.
It seems atm it’s all down to the tip of DVSA plod you get as to if you get a ticket.
adam277:
Ryan the issue I have is the rules are not black and white. If they were I could deal with them.
It seems atm it’s all down to the tip of DVSA plod you get as to if you get a ticket.
I agree but how can the rules be any clearer when the variety of goods and situations is so large and operators want to take everything to the wire?
If the bubblewrap was carried in a box van, I’d be surprised if you needed any securing technique for rolls layed flat, and one or two bars would be sufficient to stop upright rolls falling out the back, and it would be accepted by all as wholly safe.
It’s only with curtainsiders, because they have no effective side support, that the issues with security tend to arise…
adam277:
Ryan the issue I have is the rules are not black and white. If they were I could deal with them.
It seems atm it’s all down to the tip of DVSA plod you get as to if you get a ticket.
I agree but how can the rules be any clearer when the variety of goods and situations is so large and operators want to take everything to the wire?
If the bubblewrap was carried in a box van, I’d be surprised if you needed any securing technique for rolls layed flat, and one or two bars would be sufficient to stop upright rolls falling out the back, and it would be accepted by all as wholly safe.
It’s only with curtainsiders, because they have no effective side support, that the issues with security tend to arise…
You really need to find a packaging company and ask them to drop a big roll of bubble wrap on you - they need no securing whatsoever in any type vehicle with sides regardless of flimsiness you could take the curtains off and wrap the whole trailer round with a maximum of two layers of kitchen clingfilm and they would never fall out probably not even in a rollover.
No effective side support in a curtainsider except the same webbing material every car driver in the country relies on the strength of to prevent them going through their windscreen in a crash. No effective side support that I can perfectly adequately brace my back against the curtain to push a 2 ton pallet on a pump truck.
Punchy Dan:
Can’t belive no one has mention the coal man yet with his sacks
What I like is the mentality that people in the business of moving their goods about by commercial vehicle like nothing more than dropping their expensive stock all over the road thank god DVSA is there to save them from themselves.
I’ve often wondered about loads of bubble wrap, my employer has a contract (which ends at the end of this month) with Jiffy Packaging in Winsford, never strapped a load (no nets on the Jiffy liveried trailers either) thankfully never had a pull on that one.
adam277:
Ryan the issue I have is the rules are not black and white. If they were I could deal with them.
It seems atm it’s all down to the tip of DVSA plod you get as to if you get a ticket.
I agree but how can the rules be any clearer when the variety of goods and situations is so large and operators want to take everything to the wire?
If the bubblewrap was carried in a box van, I’d be surprised if you needed any securing technique for rolls layed flat, and one or two bars would be sufficient to stop upright rolls falling out the back, and it would be accepted by all as wholly safe.
It’s only with curtainsiders, because they have no effective side support, that the issues with security tend to arise…
You really need to find a packaging company and ask them to drop a big roll of bubble wrap on you - they need no securing whatsoever in any type vehicle with sides regardless of flimsiness you could take the curtains off and wrap the whole trailer round with a maximum of two layers of kitchen clingfilm and they would never fall out probably not even in a rollover.
No effective side support in a curtainsider except the same webbing material every car driver in the country relies on the strength of to prevent them going through their windscreen in a crash. No effective side support that I can perfectly adequately brace my back against the curtain to push a 2 ton pallet on a pump truck.
Granted I’m only guessing how large and heavy these bubble wrap rolls are. I can’t recall dealing with one. I assumed that industrially they would be at least 2m in length, wide enough that you’d struggle to get your arms all the way around, and at least heavier than a couple of heavy footballs. You’d expect anything much smaller or lighter to be bundled for ease of handling and storage.
I can accept that some things might be so feather-light and innocuously squishy as to need no additional strapping, but I can also imagine that such products are probably so niche (compared to the bulk of normal haulage) that a DVSA officer won’t be drawn on where he draws the line in regard to weight and firmness of a rolled product before insisting it must be strapped down for safety, because the conventional wisdom will be that any rolled product of a type found on a lorry either needs a container for handling or needs to be strapped down.
What I mean by “no side support” in relation to a curtainsider is that you cannot really pack tight against the curtain to keep things still, unless you pack until the curtain bulges, and you cannot (usually) secure a strap or a bar against the curtain sides.
I’ve seen some special trailers that do have straps and hook points running along the curtain itself, but the curtain is significantly heavier than normal, cannot be opened when the hooks are used, and thus they are loaded from the back - I’m not really sure why they are used instead of box vans, unless these curtains were a retrofit to provide better load security after the trailers were purchased (or maybe are still cheaper or lighter than a box van and are used for weight reasons). With some other trailers, you can build up the sides with slats or bars - I seem to recall Stobarts had these for caged loads (again, precluding side loading).
Rjan:
I’ve seen some special trailers that do have straps and hook points running along the curtain itself, but the curtain is significantly heavier than normal, cannot be opened when the hooks are used, and thus they are loaded from the back - I’m not really sure why they are used instead of box vans, unless these curtains were a retrofit to provide better load security after the trailers were purchased (or maybe are still cheaper or lighter than a box van and are used for weight reasons). With some other trailers, you can build up the sides with slats or bars - I seem to recall Stobarts had these for caged loads (again, precluding side loading).
Tesco used to have a lot of these trailers because they used roll cages. Each row had one strap pulling forwards across the trailer and secured at each end to a ring on tensioned straps which ran between several posts, for the length of the trailer. If you were unlucky enough to have a backload of suppliers produce: eg pallets of Tilda Rice, then it was quite a performance stripping it all down including the TIR cord, erecting the false headboard and then re-erecting everything again. The same performance all over again when you got back to the RDC.
