Neil from Messick's here. Today we're going to do a video to show you some of the pitfalls that you can watch out for when hauling your tractor on a trailer. The amount of improperly loaded and overloaded trailers that you'll see with equipment on it is shockingly and unfortunately common. One thing's that guys often do wrong when they're sizing their trailer to their equipment is not calculating the GVW properly. Now the GVW is the gross vehicle weight of the load that these tires are able to carry.
What guys will often do is buy say a 7,000-pound trailer and assume that that trailer can haul 7,000 pounds, and that is not correct. The amount of tractor that you could put on your trailer is that 7000 pounds less the weight of the trailer itself. The trailer is included in that capacity rating. When you're looking for a trailer and you're sizing your tractor to trailer, do remember that you need to include the trailer itself and the weight of the GVW.
Seen a lot of unfortunate choices made on the places that guys choose to run their straps or chains. When you're looking for places on your tractor in order to secure it, it's best to look for places around the chassis and not anywhere up around the operator station. Throwing a strap, say across the floorboards here, or looping something up in around the grab handles is not a good idea. These are really made for the operator and [chuckles] not for, say, a chain or a strap that's going to get ratcheted down across it going across the arms in the hood, bad idea.
You'll find all kinds of areas back here, say behind your grill guard or over top of your loader torque tube or around the back of the tractor that are really good places to put straps. My personal favorite in every one of our trailers you'll find a clevis, you go ahead and put that clevis through the hitch itself through the drawbar in the back and run a chain through that, and that's a great secure place in order to tie down your load.
A lot of guys will have concerns when it comes to straps versus chains. I would echo that. Whenever I haul my tractors around, I always take the time to put chains on my machines. Chains are harder to put on than what straps are because you need to use a binder and stuff in order to tighten that up versus the ratchet, which is very easy on your straps. Concerns tend to come from one or two things. For one, the breaking strength of these is lower than what chains are, and if they go across any kind of sharp corner, they can tear and rip.
Speaking for our own dealership, one of our sales guys here about 10 days ago, was hauling an RTD on a small trailer secured down with two of these 3,000 pounds straps. He crossed over top of a train track and when he did so, the bottom of the trailer struck the rail. When that happened, it literally ripped the hitch right out of the back of his truck and the trailer stopped cold. Now, when that had happened, the RTV that was on the back of that trailer did not stay on. It was secured with two of these straps well within their load rating and properly put on the machine, but these things ripped off and that machine came off of the trailer at probably about 15 miles an hour or so.
So, keep in mind, do they work? Yes. Are they legal? Sure, but you talk to guys that run loads and running trucks and stuff all the time, you'll always find a lot more comfort with putting chains on your equipment.
The other thing you want to be mindful of is where you center the load of your tractor on your trailer. When pulling things on, you want to have a fair portion of the weight up on your truck pushing down on the bumper, things are going to tow better that way. You can usually see that if you take a step away from your truck and take a look. You'll see either the back end being lifted up or pushed down and ideally, it should be pushed down and that suspension leveled out nicely.
One thing you want to watch though is when you back your tractor off, be mindful of how your ton weight is changing. I'll tell you a personal story here of a mistake that I made one time. With this actual truck and trailer, I was parked on a slope in a customer's driveway and when I backed my tractor off the back of my trailer, I went onto my ramps and lifted that ton weight up and took enough weight off the back tires of my truck, that the entire thing started sliding backwards and down the hill. I was fortunate enough to be quick on the hydrostat and got off that thing as fast as possible [chuckles] and got the truck back down on the ground.
Keep that in mind. Your ton weight is not just set up for trailering the thing down the road, think about what's happening when you're backing that tractor off and what it might do to your truck.
I picked this specific truck, trailer, and tractor for a reason and it's to be able to show you where you can run into problems with departure angles. You can see here as I approach the ramps and the tractor starts to go up, anything that I got hanging behind the tractor now lowers down to the ground as I approach up the trailer. You do need to be mindful on machines that you don't scrape your implements on the ground as you're going up.
There are certain tractors, competitors in this space rhymes with green, color of the grass, who will do things on this size tractor that set the backhoe back further by say, putting a second seat back here, and moving that hoe further back behind the machine. When you do that kind of stuff, it really ruins your departure angle. Now when you go up ramps like this, you're going find sometimes you can't even get up on because your implement, your backhoe is dragging on the ground.
Guys will find creative solutions when they run into those kinds of problems, finding a hill or something to load on, but obviously much nicer if you pay attention to the trailer selection that you have versus the tractor that you've got, and make sure you're able to clear everything when you go up those ramps.
Another miscalculation that I see guys make are the way that they calculate the weights for their tractors. Oftentimes, the weight that you're going to find on a website or a glossy brochure is going to be a shipping weight for the machine, not the machines operating wait. When you go through, you need to remember to add things like ballast that you may have in your tires or even the attachments that are on the machine. In the case of something like a BX23, the weight of this is not going to include, say the bucket on the backhoe, right? Because those come in as separate pieces to the dealership. They're not included in the machine shipping weight that you'll find in the back of the brochure.
Make sure you go through and total up the weight of all those doodads, the fuel that's in the machine, any ballasts that's in the tires, cutting edges, implements that you may have hanging on to the machine. All of that stuff should be totaled up into the weight of the load that you've got sitting on your trailer.
That's a couple of tips that I'd have for guys that are hauling around their tractors. I know many of you have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff, probably a lot more than I do. If you've got any interesting stories or problems that you've had when it comes to hauling equipment around, leave them down in the comments below. It really helps all of us learn some new things to watch out for and ways to be more safe with our tractors and equipment. If we could help you with any part sales and service needs that you have, give us a call at Messick's 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com
Neil from Messick's here, out today with the Land Pride S 820 post auger to go on the front of some compact tractors, or machines are going to have a little less hydraulic flow. This is a unique piece that we've had a lot of interest in here lately, coming from guys that are a little disappointed in the performance of three-point hitch post augers. Remember, about a year ago or so ago I did what was one of our most popular videos of the five worst attachments for a compact tractor. One of those was a three-point hitch post auger. This is the much better alternative. We'll take a walk around here and show you exactly how this fits up to the tractor.
Today, I'm going to show you how to get your tractor unstuck from the mud using your load or there's a little technique that you can do to help get that tractor out on your own, without needing another machine in order to tow you out
Neil from Messick's here. Today, to talk to you a little bit about a three-point quick hitch for the back of your tractor. Nearly 500 videos on YouTube now, believe it or not, and in several of them, I've actually bad mouth these things a little bit. The dealership side, they cause us a little bit of frustration sometimes because industry standards between these quick hitches and your implements are not strictly defined. There's a lot of implements these quick hitches don't work well with. That gives us sometimes a little bit of a bad taste for them.
