The whole thing on yesterdays post about doing a wheelie in a truck.
It wasn't entirely out of my imagination. I was in a truck when it happened for real.
When I was running the container yard, I bought and sold used containers. One of my long-time friends, JB had an old International Harvester Semi truck that had been converted to a flatbed.
For a small fee, he would deliver a 20' used container. The containers hung over the back axle by a quite a bit, but we figured there was this big chunk of iron block up front to counterballance it. The first several deliveries, everythong went smoothly. He always cased the delivery place beforehand and made sure there was a good tree to tie off to, and he would chain the container to the tree and just drive out from under it.
I went with him to deliver a container to an industrial yard for storage. We loaded it up and headed out.
We had to stop for a light. When we took off, and JB's foot slipped on the clutch a little. When the truck jerked forward, the front end lifted slowly off of the ground until the back ent of the container bumped on the ground. Mind you we were moving forward all the time. The front end came back down ver slowly and bounced back into the air in slow motion.
Each time it rebounded, it went a little less high, until we were finally back on all four tires. We VERY gingerly got off the road to check things out. The front end was so light that we didn't want to both get out of the truck at the same time.
The flatbed was a home-made conversion, and it was fairly well done, but had been done at least 20 years before. The structure of the flatbed was being held to the structure of the Truck by some big u-bolts. When JB jerked the containers off of the flatbed by driving out from under them, the u-bolts had shifted about six inches to the rear, changing the crenter of gravity.
We didn't have any equipment with us to shift the container of flatbed forward, so I got in the front bumper to put as much weight on the front wheels as possible. We very slowly inched our way back to the yard.
Everyone wondered what the hell was going on when we rounded the corner into the yard with me standing on the front bumper of the truck.
Now that we had figured out what had happened, it became a ritual of passage to take any newcomers in the truck with a container on the back and give them a ride in "Willie".
6 comments:
Isn't it great when you can happily survive those moments and tell about them later with the wit and wisdom of hindsight?
Sarah: It is always fun to walk out on the thin ice and listen to it crack. I have taken a lot of risks in my life and the results weren't always positive (and I have the scars to prove it).
I love stories like that. Sure wasn't really pleasant at the time but those kind of "for instances" make for terrific memories!
PQ: Not pleasant, but definitely a rush. Once we figured out that we weren't going to die it was pretty cool.
I can just picture this in my mind. HILARIOUS!
ncp: There was a moment there when we first started up that I was sure things were going to go terribly wrong, but not one drop of blood was spilled, and nothing was broken. We got a lot of WTF! looks. It was worth the experience just to see the looks on people's faces.
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