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Tried and True Tire Repairs

The first, and most crucial step in any tire repair process is to completely remove any foreign material from the damaged area. Photos: Jim Park

The flat tire is arguably motoring's oldest nemesis. Check out any film or photography from the early Automotive Age, and sooner, rather than later, somebody is going to roll their sleeves up and get to work patching a tire.

Early automotive tires were essentially scaled-up versions of bicycle tires. But they evolved quickly to meet the more rigorous demands put on them by early cars and trucks. Improvements to roads and highways made a big difference, too. So today, full-on tire failures are relatively rare compared to those early years behind the wheel.

But flat tires remain a serious threat for fleets today. And, of course, when flats do occur, they rarely happen in front of your local tire dealer's store. And fixing a truck tire is a complicated, safety-focused affair. Unlike an enterprising passenger car driver, pulling out a set of tire plugs and setting to work just isn't going to get the job done.

And, of course, tires aren't cheap. Smart fleet managers understand that wringing every possible mile from a truck tire saves money. Which means that getting tires fixed properly after failures do occur is vital for both vehicle productivity and fleet profitability.

As with so many things in fleet operations, your drivers are your first line of defense when it comes to tire repairs. And this defense should begin every day with a thorough pre-trip inspection with a focus on good tire health.

The quickest and surest way to determine if there's a slow leak in a tire is by checking tire pressure with an accurate, properly calibrated tire gauge. Unfortunately, many drivers still believe that whacking a tire with an ax ...Read the rest of this story

The Quest for Uptime

While the complexity is increasing, the reliability of the current generation of trucks and engines is the best we've seen in several years. Photos: Jim Park

We're learning. We're doing a better job at keeping trucks out of the shop and out on the road earning money, but it's been a long, steep learning curve. Ever since the first diesel particulate filters appeared in 2007, fleets have been struggling to diagnose problems and make the necessary repairs. One of the greatest hurdles has been confusing messages and sometimes misleading information. Various sensors are often the culprit, but for the technicians working through the problem, the troubleshooting exercise was at first new and unfamiliar.

Each new generation of engine, and indeed mid-generation updates, brought new fault codes, new troubleshooting trees and more complexity in making the diagnosis. How much more complex? About tenfold.

“If you go back to pre-EPA-07, you'd get about 200-300 codes out of the [electronic control module],” says Gregg Mangione, senior vice president of maintenance at Penske Logistics. “Compare that to an engine [meeting 2014 greenhouse gas emission regs], with over a dozen different controllers. Some trucks are throwing between 2,000 and 3,000 different fault codes.”

However, Mangione says equipment manufacturers have learned to scale back on what information they present and how they present it. Previously, he says, “every time they turned on the dashboard light it created a problem for the driver. And that in turn created a problem for the shop. They had to decide whether the problem was serious enough to force the driver to stop.

“Now, with inexpensive telematics and truck-to-terminal communications becoming commonplace, we can more easily sort through the codes and message the driver accordingly. So while the trucks are throwing off more data than ever before, fleets are learning to use that information.”

One can imagine ...Read the rest of this story