Long story fella's... grab a drink and have a read, it's definitely worth it!!
Friday was great, school then beautiful weather to do my brakes in. I was installing my new Powerslots w/ Cyro Rotors and got to the driver side and I had a slide pin absolutely frozen inside the bore on the caliper mounting bracket. Autozone, Advanced Auto, Napa, Cecil Auto, etc... did not have the part. Dealership only - at this time it was 6-7pm and Elkton's dealership was closed at 5 until Monday.
I got up at 10am (after being up until 3am) and called the local junkyards, all of which did not have the part. I called a dealership in Rising Sun and they had the *updated* part and it was $104.00. I bought it, slapped it on, and test drove for about 30 miles all together, to seat the pads. I leave around 12:30 to go to my friend's house.
Next I head about an hour north breaking in the brakes and pickup a 3,000lb trailer at my buddies house. I try to keep breaking in the brakes like prescribed by the instructions on the way down to VA - about 200+ miles. Here is a picture of the truck and trailer combo!
My truck @ the Maryland Welcome house headed to pick up the Cummins.
Trailer.jpg
We get to VA just off exit 118 and pick up the truck. First we load it facing forward on the trailer and decide it puts too much weight on the tongue and decide it's better to center the majority of the weight over the trailer axles.
Here is a really cool picture of us loading it and him blowing smoke!
SmokinTrailer.jpg
Ok here is when it gets fishy! The Cummins is loaded backwards, my truck is sitting about level (just touching the overloads on level ground), the side window's are busted out of the Cummins (was in an accident) and the back window was open. Besides the truck, everything looked GOOD! Well the tailgate had fallen off so it was strapped into my bed. His drop-in bedliner started raising up when we started driving but was secured in by his toolbox so it was like a big parachute but not going to fly out. We think aw what the hell - if the stroker can't overcome that then we shouldn't be doing this! We pull onto the onramp and start accelerating. She accelerated well for having a GVCW of 17k. We reach about 60-65 mph by the end of the ramp, merge and the small incline leveled off and had a very small downhill slant after it. a Huge Semi truck was in the slow lane running extremely fast. With in a few hundred yards he had pulled up very close behind me and then switched lanes. As he did that I felt the trailer get sucked towards him and I also saw how close he missed me by and how close he was beside me as he was traveling at least 15-20 mph faster then I was. I corrected to the right, at which point he had passed me, but the trailer no longer had a "vacuum" semi-trailer next to it and came back over. I tried correcting for this but it was already fishtailing badly. It happened so fast, my buddy and I were like WHOA WHOA WHOA... Speeding up was not an option as we were already going 60mph on a slight downhill in some traffic, and slamming the brakes wasn't a good idea either. I pumped the brakes while coutering the fishtailing but it wasn't working. I tried knocking it out of O/D into 3rd to help slow it down w/o brakes but I don't think I hit the button. We ended up making 3 "S" shaped tiremarks from the tires skidding covering 2 lanes of 95 NB, the shoulder and some of the grassy side. In the end of the 2nd S or beginning of the 3rd S the trailer came w/in about 3-5 feet of 2 other cars that were on the side of the road. There were 3 people trying to change a tire (2 guys/1 girl) and apparently they were from Virginia Tech. They heard us coming thankfully and were able to move out of the way. They later ran up and helped keep an eye out for us, so let me get to that part. After the 3rd S shape, we came all the way around, all 51 foot of truck and trailer and ended up facing oncoming traffic while basically powersliding sideways. We ended up sliding all the way off the shoulder and into the grass about 10 feet. All I remember at that point was thinking we were going to flip OR roll down the ravine that was about 15 feet off the road 30 feet straight down into a creek. We jumped out, and checked everything out. And the VA Tech students ran up to us. We made sure we were all ok and assessed the situation. The truck was still 100% tight on the trailer and we thankfully did not flip, I have NO idea why we didn't. We unhooked the truck, drove it off, and I drove up the grassy area next to the shoulder about 100 yards to where there was a flat spot, waited for traffic to have an opening and turned around the right way. We turned the Cummins around too but this time loaded it from the front (after thinking about it, we decided the axles were far back on the trailer and placing the weight over those axles didn't give enough weight on the tongue, this coupled w/ the open windows were creating bad airflow as was the drop-in bedliner, as well as maybe something was wrong w/ the trailer and/or trailer brakes). We changed what we could and reloaded there on the side of 95. Things didn't get hairy again but both my buddy and I were extremely careful.
We got up to Rockville, MD and ate at Hooters. Jumped back in the truck and headed up 270 to Lancaster PA. Dropped his truck/trailer off and then I went home. I got home at 4:30am and fell right to sleep.
I'm very lucky I did not hit anybody or anything, the people involved and both trucks came out unscathed. I had pictures of the skid marks, and facing the wrong direction on 95 but my camera ate the disk apparently so I hope I can salvage those because they were incredible.
On a "performance" note... the truck pulled it extremely well, the brakes were great and when traffic got heavy we were good. Max EGT was 1100 while going from a dead stop, up a slight hill, with the pedal to the floor for about 12 seconds to get to 50mph. Average EGT was closer to 600-800. It held 55mph in O/D (most on Cruise control) at 1500-1700 rpm's up all the hills (between VA and middle PA). Max Trans Temp I saw was when it was 86* out and it read 170* while in pretty heavy, slow moving traffic. It also handled the winding/bumpy roads of PA better then expected! My buddy with the 1st gen cummins was quite impressed, and asked me how much I wanted for my truck
04-22-2007, 04:20 PM
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