How Protect Your Heavy Equipment During Towing
Posted on: 7 March 2022
Towing heavy equipment can be expensive. You need the right towing equipment, and you need to ensure that you handle the process safely and carefully. Cutting corners on time or equipment can be tempting, but it's not worth risking the safety of your heavy equipment.
Remember the equipment you're towing is very valuable. If you do something quickly to save a bit of time or money upfront, you risk incurring costly damage to your equipment. Here are five critical tips to keep your equipment safe while towing.
1. Use a Trailer
When you're towing heavy equipment, you need to use a trailer. You shouldn't just tow the equipment with its wheels spinning on the pavement. A trailer allows the equipment to ride and doesn't add any hours to its system.
2. Check the Towing Capacity Carefully
When using a truck and trailer, you need to take both of their towing capacities into account. You need to ensure that the truck's payload towing capacity can handle the weight of its passengers, the trailer, and anything else it's carrying. You also need to ensure that the trailer has the right capacity and look at its combined gross combo weight rating.
3. Double-Check Your Straps
Ideally, you should double-check everything from towing capacity to the inflation on your tires. But in particular, you need to double-check your straps. Once you have the heavy equipment strapped to the trailer, walk around and check the straps again. If possible, get another set of eyes on them so that you don't overlook any strapping mistakes.
4. Use a Safety Chain
Whether you're using a hitch-and-ball connection or a gooseneck, you shouldn't exclusively rely on that connection. Instead, you should also add a safety chain. Then, if the hitch fails, this works as a backup parachute.
The safety chain ensures the truck and the trailer stay together. If a big bump in the road disengages your hitch, the trailer should still stay attached. Thanks to the safety chain, you don't have to worry about losing your heavy equipment or the accidents that would be caused if your trailer came detached on the roadway.
5. Make Sure You’re Alert
Once everything is hooked up, you probably want to hit the road immediately. But pay attention to how you feel. If you've spent all day loading the trailer, you may need to take a break and wait until the morning. Remember that tired driving is very risky. It can be as dangerous as drunk driving or texting while driving.
To be on the safe side, you may want to hire a company that specializes in towing heavy equipment. They can take care of everything for you and ensure your heavy equipment gets to its destination safely.
For more information, contact a local towing company such as Jensen Towing.
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