CumminsLuke said:
Man is this discussion getting old. 99 out of 100 of the guys who ask this question do not need it anyhow because they are private and not commercial. I am glad I live in Missouri where they are not near as strict on all this stuff. I have been running a 1-ton dually/48' gooseneck stepdeck combination that grosses 32,500lbs when you add the GVW's of the truck and trailer together, the trailer is over 10k, for over five years and have never been bothered even the least bit and I am no where near legal. Only have the truck plated at 18k and routinely gross 35k, I don't stop at the scale and they never come out after me. I do have "PRIVATE CARRIER-NOT FOR HIRE" on the nose of my trailer, which is partially true. We are not hauling for hire but we are hauling for our own business.
OK, flame away!!!!!!!
I'm envious of your lack of "regulation", however, I'd like to say that what you're doing isn't safe. It's beyond the saftey limits of what your truck was designed for. I know you're aware of it and I also know that a lot of farm country LEOs don't enforce any truck laws and I'm not trying to "preach" at you.
I hope for your sake, you never have a collision, because I personally know a state DOT official here in PA that testifies in cases just like that. They dig up the information about what your truck can handle and when they find anything over the limit, they go after everything you own.
Where I live, in a typical DOT routine truck stop this is what happens: There's level 1,2 and 3 inspections. A level 2 is typical. You are asked to produce all papers. If you get through that, you are asked to produce a med card and a log book, show that you have a fire extinguisher and 3 red triangles. When your registration is being checked, that's when they would discover that 30,000+ lbs is FAR in excess of any pickups capability and you would be put out of service immediately and given a written summons for being "out of registration parameters". While that's going on, your truck's trailer weights and trucks weights will be checked with scales. If any are overweight, you are immediately out of service.
That's just the tiop of the iceberg. You should consider yourself lucky to be able to be that far in excess of your truck's capacity and not get nailed to the wall, like you would in my community.
I would also say that the DOT laws are becoming much more of a set of "federal" regulations as each year passes. My guess is that if you got a copy of your DOT regs, even though they're not enforced in your community, you'd find you are not within the DOT parameters for a safe rig.
Everyone is a prouct of their enviroment. Our enviroment is one of regulations to the book. The laws enforced in my area are the federal DOT guidelines.
