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Avoiding truck breakdowns
By Steve Sturgess, consultant, speaker and writer to the heavy-duty
trucking industry
FleetNet America is one of the largest truck breakdown service
agencies in the country and its customers call by the hundreds of
thousands for tows or roadside repairs. Founder and President
Oren Summer has built an organization that utilizes a network of more
than 60,000 truck repair vendors to assist in providing vehicle repair and
emergency road service across the continental United States and Canada.
Using the last five years of data on roadside calls by frequency, cost
and downtime, Sumner has been able to identify the most likely causes
of breakdowns for class 3 through 8 trucks.
(Most of them can lead to
trucks taken out of service and extensive fines, under the Federal Motor
Carrier Safety Administration’s new safety initiative, “Compliance,
Safety and Accountability” or CSA. If you don’t know about CSA, visit
http://csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/about/default.aspx to understand how it impacts
anyone running commercial vehicles on the highway.)
Tires take first place
Tire problems dominate as a cause of breakdowns, too often a result of
poor maintenance practices that result in underinflated tires being dispatched
under loaded trucks. Currently major fleets are addressing this
all too common problem with automated tire inflation systems, according
to Al Cohn of Pressure Systems International, makers of the product.
“Fully 37 percent of the nation’s Top 100 fleets are using automated
tire inflation systems,” says Cohn. “And 35 percent of new trailer orders
include them. We’re also seeing some increase in the use of tire pressure
monitoring.”
Peggy Fisher, president of the remote tire diagnostics system supplier
TireStamp and a tire expert agrees. “There’s been a big change in
the numbers over the last 10 years and that’s good,” she says. “But if
tires still produce 25 percent of road calls, it’s still a problem.”
Even when properly inflated, tires can cause an out-of-service violation.
“The criteria are gross,” says Fisher, “missing tread, low tread
depth. Those sorts of problems should be dealt with in the pre-trip inspection.
My advice is to improve maintenance to minimize maintenance
costs, violations and breakdowns.”
Brakes
Any brake-related problem is likely to draw an out-of-service citation
and that means a call-out before the vehicle can be moved. According
to ArvinMeritor’s Director of Global Brand Management David
Giroux, the company has published a document called “Enemies”
that lists the causes of brake problems. The top seven are:
● Internal water and contamination in air supply & control system
● Oil passing from compressor
● External contamination and corrosion
● Air pressure leakage
● Brake system pressure, timing imbalance
● Reduced foundation brake performance
● Ineffective maintenance practices
The paper cautions maintenance managers to include regular and
consistent brake inspections as part of preventive maintenance and to
service with OEM-level components. Low-quality parts can compromise
the brake system.
Not just a nuisance
The FleetNet data breaks out different categories of electrical problems
‒ cranking system, charging system and lighting. But put them
together and electrical issues are right behind brake problems in frequency.
Electrical problems are on the increase, with cranking problems
and lighting climbing while charging problems are falling.
Bruce Purkey, president of Purkey’s Fleet Electric, says part of the problem is the reduction of idle time and the
increasing loads from driver comfort requirements.
“The most important thing a fleet can do in
this age of restrictive idling policies is to manage
the electrical loads,” says Purkey. “Be
aware of added loads. You can have a driver
put on a 3000-W inverter and fire it up every
few minutes drawing nearly 300 amps off the
batteries. As far as batteries go, it’s not just cold
cranking amps you have to be concerned with.
Batteries have to have enough capacity to supply
the loads and be able to cycle. Some fleets
are looking at AGM batteries that can better
withstand the cycling up and down.”
Running batteries down can be prevented
by specifying trucks with a low-voltage disconnect
switch, which senses battery voltage and
takes loads offline when cranking voltage approaches
a critical level.
Charging issues can be detected in real
time with Purkey’s patented system for fleets
that use dispatch communications. The system
reports charging issues to the shop or office,
which allows decisions to be made that
can avoid a breakdown call.
“If a truck only has two hours to run to
get to the shop, it can run in on batteries,”
says Purkey, “and the maintenance department
can have an alternator ready. At the
same time, the maintenance manager can
give instructions not to put on four new batteries,
as is common with such calls.”
After a repair at an outside shop, Purkey
says the truck should be thoroughly checked.
“Get the truck in and go through the electrical
system to make sure the problem has been
fixed and avoid another road call. TMC’s
RP129 lays it all out.” (The Technology and
Maintenance Council of the American Trucking
Associations is the leading authority on
truck specification and maintenance. TMC
has a wealth of information, now distributed
on CD, to help maintenance professionals.
For more information, visit atabusinesssolutions.
com/s-4—technologymaintenance.
aspx.)
For lighting woes, LEDs are the answer.
“One thing that’s interesting to a guy who’s
been in lighting the last two decades is the
changeover to LEDs,” says Truck-Lite’s Chief
Technology Officer Brad van Riper. “They’ve
been around 20 years, the technology is mature,
and there’s a wealth of data to justify the
purchase. And there’s no place on the truck
where an LED replacement can’t be made.
With the onset of the CSA initiative, it may
even be worthwhile to equip older trucks
with LED lighting.”
Wiring harnesses are yet another concern.
“The system is only as good as its weakest
link,” says van Riper. “If you have poor lighting
that requires maintenance and fault finding,
there’s a good chance a tech with an
ice-pick diagnostic tool will be in there. The
result will be corrosion of the copper within
the harness followed by lighting problems.”
Fueling and cooling
A surprisingly large number of calls to Fleet-
Net are a result of running out of fuel, something
you’d think would never happen if a
driver is paying attention. As 2011 models hit
the streets, fuel issues could also include running
out of diesel exhaust fluid which, like running out of fuel, is entirely preventable.
Cooling systems have long been one of
the chief reasons for roadside calls.
According
to David McKenna, Director of Powertrain
Systems for Mack, the issue with
cooling systems is almost always the connections.
The more connections you have, the
greater the potential for loss of coolant ‒ the
main failure mode for the cooling system. In
this area, a fleet is as much in the hands of
the truck OEM as its own shop, but specifying
long-life coolants, premium hoses and the
best clamps money can buy ‒ along with
making sure technicians are trained to look
for and deal with cooling system issues early
‒ will definitely help.
Something new
FleetNet’s rankings for breakdown causes
have been consistent during the last five
years with one major exception: Exhaust systems
are now making an appearance on the
list. Never a factor before 2009, it’s likely this
is fallout from the adoption of particulate
traps in the exhaust post-2007.
The data
doesn’t break
out the types
of exhaust
problems
being encountered,
so
the rising incidence
of exhaust
system
related roadside
problems
could be
a result of
drivers being confused about what the dashboard
lights mean or it could be that the systems
are failing altogether.
Another problem on the horizon is the
“check engine” light that comes with many
post-2010 engines. According to Bruce Stockton,
formerly vice president of maintenance
for Con-way Truckload, 2010 engines are
throwing a lot of fault codes. While that doesn’t
necessarily indicate anything more than
that the software needs further development, it still means trucks have to stop to check out
the problem.
Addressing these common issues before
they lead to roadside failures will handle 90
percent of the problems that result in repairs,
tows and downtime, and keep your trucks
running.
Steve Sturgess is a well-known consultant,
speaker and writer specializing in the heavy-duty
trucking industry. He can be reached at
(949) 338-6425 or sturgess@aol.com. | |
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