Some newbie type questions about continental ferry type trailers.
What are the yellow plates on the side of them? Look about the size of a A4 sheet about 1/3rd and 2/3rds of the way along?
A DSV Scania passed me this morning with a mid lift up, so the trailer was at quite an angle (smaller wheels than a UK spec trailer), does it wear tyres faster or bugger up the suspension?
Cheers
That’s what the yellow plates are for ^^^ known as a leg lift. Except that’s Samskip not DSV,
And the smaller wheels will be because the trailer is a mega trailer, little wheels bring the height down maybe?? Not 100%
Mid lift raised is purely to save tyre wear when the trailer is empty or lightly loaded as the extra axle isn’t needed to spread the weight.
A trailer with a designed running height of 1m always looks funny when pulled by a truck with a 1.25 5th wheel. I don’t think it would do any damage as configurations like this will be considered when designing and building a trailer.
Never seen the leg lift though. Thanks for posting that picture.
m1cks:
A trailer with a designed running height of 1m always looks funny when pulled by a truck with a 1.25 5th wheel. I don’t think it would do any damage as configurations like this will be considered when designing and building a trailer.
Never seen the leg lift though. Thanks for posting that picture.
Fair enough. Just looks a bit weird when you the front airbag almost fully inflated and the back one almost flat.
Having said that I was covering a shunt job on Wednesday, so I was pulling trailers around at probably roughly the same angle…
I work with a lot of ferry trailer’s, and as above the yellow patch’s mark where they can be lifted, as for the mega trailer’s suspension, it’s for 2 reason’s, over the water a many know has a 4mtr limit on height (not every where but mostly) and to around that they run mega trailer’s, where over here we run with a king pin height around, 1150-1350, over the water that wouldn’t give us 3mtrs of load height available. they figured out if they reduce the running height to less than a meter to the 5th wheel height, that would give them 3mtr’ of load height, so more freight carried.
as for the mixing of mega trailer’s to standard unit’s, most trailer’s have the load levelling valve on the middle axle, and most of the time all the air bag’s are linked in series, n/s/f - n/s/m - n/s/r linked together and etc for the other side.
so when the front is really high, the 1st axle airbag are near the limit, the middle axle is at normal height and the 3rd axle is low height, it’s well within the operating ride height.
if any of you pull ewals trailer’s (found on many other trailer’s aswell) have normal uk male and female couplings, and a small grey box with a lever with duo-matic stamped on it, I not sure how it’s connected up to the air system, but depending on what you pluged in to, it also set the ride height aswell, so the duomatic would inflate the bag’s to 1meter running height, and the uk coupling would inflate to a higher height.
