Two years ago on this very page I asked if we were doing enough to ensure that trucks and their wheels don’t part company (‘Are we doing enough?,’ June 2006). I asked what we had learned since the 1990s when wheels seemed to be falling off trucks all the time—and killing people in the process.

The letters and e-mails that I got in response to that editorial suggested that we hadn’t learned anywhere near enough and weren’t actually doing much about it. In spite of a massive effort 10 years earlier to create training programs and demand that every wheel and tire technician pass a simple course in wheel and hub maintenance, the problem persisted.

I feared that complacency was common, perhaps even rampant. And several responses told me I was on the money.

Here’s what one veteran Ontario technician had to say, requesting anonymity for fear of losing his job:

“I work for one of the largest companies operating in Canada who are the so-called leaders in preventive maintenance and I can
assure you complacent thinking is the norm around here,” he wrote.

“Sure we had the new procedures and some training thrown at us when wheel-offs were in the news, but that is not the case now. Of the 12 technicians working in my shop, there is only one installing wheels correctly, one comes close, and the others
aren’t even in the ball park. Management does nothing and will do nothing until a wheel-off occurs. And when that does happen they will review the procedures taken, and when they find the tech who didn’t do it right they will fire him and remind those that are left of the proper procedures. A week or two later, things will be back to ‘normal’.

“Are we doing enough? In the time I have been with this company, I have been on only nine training sessions, each being one to three days in length. That’s a maximum of 27 days for the 15-plus years I have been here. If it wasn’t for my own initiative, I would know how to grease a truck and change oil and that’s it. With all the systems on a vehicle today, I hardly think 27 days of training covers it. We have senior technicians who can’t adjust clutches, who can’t inspect brakes properly, who know little about fifth wheels or the electronics on a vehicle. Our company is adding to the problem by hiring unskilled labor to perform vehicle inspections, although the corporate line is they are to do oil and grease jobs only. These same guys are mounting and dismounting tires without knowledge of what they are doing. Training doesn’t exist.”

Is that typical? Probably not, but is it rare? No, not according to other correspondence I had at the time and have had since.

I’m revisiting the issue now at the request of a New Brunswick reader who just found that editorial of mine in the Tires & Wheels
Decision Center on todaystrucking.com. He sent an e-mail to comment on it, asking me to keep “pushing” the matter.

“As a trainer for the ‘Keeping Your Wheels On’ course I agree with you 150percent,” he wrote. “At the close of this training I see lots of students with high marks on the exams, but then to see them go back to the same bad habits they arrived with is discouraging. The paper certificate is what most come for, not the training. I’d say we’re not gaining on the problem in the classroom.

“I think the mounting hardware (hub-pilot-design studs and nuts) is not maintained well enough and most of the time not at all. In some fleets with high wheel-removal and installation rates the hardware has lost most of its ability to maintain enough clamp load to hold the wheels, hub and drums tight even if the torque wrench was accurate at 500lb ft. This is tough to get across to some techs.”

No matter how you cut it, this is all bad news. Continuing bad news. And while honest ignorance about wheel and hub maintenance may have been a vaguely plausible excuse back in the 1990s, there’s no excuse whatsoever in 2008. Wheels do continue to come adrift but, apparently, too many people are willing to ignore that fact. I’m not happy about this.

This industry sees fit to push for speed limiters, which will save no lives at all—and likely cost a few, in fact, while conserving
paltry amounts of fuel—but hardly any effort is made to fixa real problem. The wheel course is in place, so the wheel-off problem
went away, right?

Well, it didn’t. And when I put these two issues side by side, I get more angry by the minute.?

Rolf Lockwood is editorial director and publisher of Today’s Trucking.
You can reach him at 416-614-5825 or rolf@todaystrucking.com.