Cruise Control:
5 pages on lift axles, christ at this rate it will the succeed the 20 pages on “6x2 or 6x4 whic is better” topic
Yeh, FFS get a life !
bobthedog:
What rarity? Croome had dozens. Murfitt had hundreds.No, the challenge is in a real situation. Whacking a cone is not stressful enough.
Like it or not, your idea is an anchronism. Oh, and Croomes and Murfitts kit was all with rear lift.
Yeah right from what I saw of Murfitt’s ‘drawbar’ outfits they were mostly,if not all, the close coupled caravan type jobs and think Croomes were mostly,if not all,the same 
.But lift axle 6x4’s get real you might find some of those in Scandinavia but it’s anyone’s guess why they want to go to all the added complication of lifting a drive axle 
.
The challenge using cones (and posts) is good enough ‘if’ the outfit (and it’s driver) are good enough not to hit any and if anyone finds it stressful,as a driver, just because it’s a yard with the real thing after that,then they’re in the wrong job.At least that’s the type of conditions I worked under in a firm which really did use the real thing (except they were 6x2 lift axle not 6x4).
But a proven design with a 40 tonne+ payload potential,which handles at least as good,if not better,than the present artic outfits,(but with the added proven design advantages of a 6x4 driveline). Some anachronism.
Wheel Nut:
Currywurst has got his ideas from watching too much Convoy in his nursing homeThe Drugs don’t work
Did’nt see any Scandinavian type drawbar outfits in Convoy though.
Even the Finns use the caravan chassis trailers and tag axles
Wheel Nut:
Even the Finns use the caravan chassis trailers and tag axles
That’s a C train because anyone who likes driving that must be a zb. 
By the way what’s the traction like in the winter and getting the axle weights right must be an absolute zb nightmare but when I’ve put my drawbar outfit into the bay maybe Bob the Bulldog can see if he can do it faster with that.
lift axles are perfectly sutiable for uk road work
if you do a bit of off road driving go for a tag as they have better traction than a midlift as you can get more weight imposed on the drive axle
carryfast is a nutter
hows that for three bullet points
Carryfast:
bobthedog:
And New Zealand is not the UK or Europe. Croomes ran drawbars, various types, and it worked just fine with the demounts, but the loads could be in the boxes for weeks.I would dearly love to see you put your beloved 6x4 rigid with the 45’ drawbar A frame on the bay in any RDC. I would, in fact, pay to see it. Of course, the bays either side would have to be in use, and the parking/waiting area opposite would have to be full as usual, too. I reckon that I would have hours of amusement watching you try. It would be value for money. Methinks the shunter drivers would be sat there laughing their butts off, same as I would. I know very well that I would not want to drive it because it would be ■■■■■■■■■■ and difficult in places like Chepstow Tesco.
Truth is, I have had enough of you. You are clearly old enough to have an idea, but you are also obviously not bright enough to. Your argument is empty and repetitive.
Empty and repetitive whatever.I did’nt say use the thing for uk supermarket distribution work
But the 6x4 prime mover might be a problem,because of their rarity here,for obvious reasons.
it doesnt matter what kind of work you do the truck still has to be loaded and unloaded and it could be anywhere from an airfeild or somewhere designed for a horse and cart so it has to be practical. And anyone who has loaded wine in europe will tell you the vinyards can be in some out of the way places as can many places you end up.
As for the reversing exersize im sure we could arange a 6x2 prime mover and thats to your advantage and see how you get on it could be the main event at the trucknet xmas do
kr79:
it doesnt matter what kind of work you do the truck still has to be loaded and unloaded and it could be anywhere from an airfeild or somewhere designed for a horse and cart so it has to be practical. And anyone who has loaded wine in europe will tell you the vinyards can be in some out of the way places as can many places you end up.
As for the reversing exersize im sure we could arange a 6x2 prime mover and thats to your advantage and see how you get on it could be the main event at the trucknet xmas do
So far we’ve got just about every bad situation that you can think of thrown at the 6x4 drawbar outfit from a supermarket RDC to a vineyard that’s only got access for horses and carts but for some reason all of those issues and problems miraculously disappear as soon as you couple the same trailer to a tractor unit instead of a rigid. Then we’ve got the issue of double drive axles being used every day on road use throughout North America and many other countries and which were the main configuration here on general haulage rigids before artics became the so called answer to everything until the Scandinavians saw that the Brit ■■■■■■ knew better .But now for some reason as soon as the UK gets mentioned it’s a case of only the worst will do while other countries use the old school proven engineering in one form or another.But I’m sure that if the yanks can ‘manage’ to reverse a 6x4 conventional unit,pulling a 53 foot semi onto a loading bay,or make the thing turn right at an four way intersection in the average yank urban area,then a cab over 6x4 rigid pulling a euro spec 45 foot semi with a drawbar dolly,should be able to manage ok in most situations in Europe,including the uk,and on that reversing and agility excercise which I’m waiting for Rikki and/or Tand D to bring on to add a bit of interest to the magazine. .But it’s probably going to have to be a 6x2 prime mover for reasons already given but it’ll have all it’s axles in use so can’t really see where the so called massive ‘advantage’ over the 6x4 is supposed to be unless there’s deep snow in which case it will probably get stuck on the agility excercise before the 6x4 would have done.
I never said anything about 6x4 on Croomes, just a 6 wheeled rigid… You are the one banging the Thomas the Tank Engine toy drum kit about the 6x4s. And Croome had A frames long before the close coupled. He got rid of them because they were more difficult to do demounts than the close coupled… apparently, reversing them was difficult.
What is unproven about 6X2s? They have been around for a long time.
Now here is the part that may make life difficult for your mind, Carpy. It is no good just running the tests on a coned out airfield… Do you know why? It’s because (I know, you really don’t know any better) we have to drive these things in real life situations, with other traffic and with roadworks, etc. It’s because not all roundabouts or junctions are created equal…
You think you can get that A frame plot of yours in and out of somewhere faster than I could do so with a Super B? Honestly? I could drop the pup, put the lead on a bay, put the pup on a bay, hook into the lead, drink my coffee, eat my lunch and then get hooked up and gone before you had finished writing your first accident report for hitting some poor polish drivers Volvo with your monstrosity.
I know you disagree, but you are living in a land of make believe. What works in Scandinavia or in North America will not work in the armpits of the cities in the UK.
Now, can we please allow the topic to go back to lift axles?
bobthedog:
I never said anything about 6x4 on Croomes, just a 6 wheeled rigid… You are the one banging the Thomas the Tank Engine toy drum kit about the 6x4s. And Croome had A frames long before the close coupled. He got rid of them because they were more difficult to do demounts than the close coupled… apparently, reversing them was difficult.What is unproven about 6X2s? They have been around for a long time.
Now here is the part that may make life difficult for your mind, Carpy. It is no good just running the tests on a coned out airfield… Do you know why? It’s because (I know, you really don’t know any better) we have to drive these things in real life situations, with other traffic and with roadworks, etc. It’s because not all roundabouts or junctions are created equal…
You think you can get that A frame plot of yours in and out of somewhere faster than I could do so with a Super B? Honestly? I could drop the pup, put the lead on a bay, put the pup on a bay, hook into the lead, drink my coffee, eat my lunch and then get hooked up and gone before you had finished writing your first accident report for hitting some poor polish drivers Volvo with your monstrosity.
I know you disagree, but you are living in a land of make believe. What works in Scandinavia or in North America will not work in the armpits of the cities in the UK.
Now, can we please allow the topic to go back to lift axles?
Just goes to show that not all drivers are created equal and in ‘some’ firms the ability to use demounts together with A frames without too much difficulty when reversing them is one of the requirements of the job and for wheelwobble’s benefit it’s no good running to the guvnor and telling him to change them for caravan type trailers which,like B train second trailers do on their lead trailers,impose weight on the prime mover’s rear axles which means that you can’t run both the trailer and the prime mover at their maximum potential gross weights.The arguments,concerning the issues related to 6x2 lift axle artic outfits,versus 6x4 drawbar outfits,are all related and they all come down to simple mathematics concerning fuel efficiency,on a tonne/miles of payload per gallon basis,axle weights and traction co efficients.But as I remember it I said that 6x4 prime movers would be very rare here for obvious reasons You then replied that Murfitts and Croomes had loads of them .Which I knew probably could’nt be correct .
For Copy+pastes benefit. I agree not all drivers are equal, some have experience of driving on lots of different roads with lots of different configurations, it takes a brave or stupid man to challenge the rest of the world to a duel when you have only ever practised on a fairground firing range
Britain has still got some of the best engineers in the World, so has Europe, the rules of the UK are difficult, we are a small island with too much congestion. The accountants run the traffic office and the extra weight that can be carried by using single tag axles or mini second steer axles pays benefits to the bottom line.
I give you a choice, your favoured double drive bogie with eight tyres, two diffs and heavy leaf springs or an extra 700kg payload?
The trucks I drove before going out to Africa had either steering mid axle or just two axles. and the trailer had 2 lifting axles, some trailers lifted axles one and two, others lifted one and three. This also gave a big benefit to the cost of toll charges.
Taken from a random internet search, kind of agrees with my take on it. 
6x4 Double Drive tractor units with twin wheels (44 tonnes).
In poor site conditions the Double Drive axles (with twin wheels) give unequalled levels of traction and stability. Although there is a slight sacrifice in payload due to the extra weight, these tractors will go where others fear to tread! This allows James Booth to virtually guarantee they will deliver, even in the most difficult conditions.
6x2 Mid-lift tractor units (44 tonnes).
The industry standard, this configuration maximises payload at 44 tonnes and offers reduced tyre wear. The rear-most axle is driven on twin wheels, and suitable for all but the harshest site conditions.
Our trailers are fitted with a lifting front axle and steering rear axle to minimise tyre wear and give us a decent payload
Wheel Nut:
For Copy+pastes benefit. I agree not all drivers are equal, some have experience of driving on lots of different roads with lots of different configurations, it takes a brave or stupid man to challenge the rest of the world to a duel when you have only ever practised on a fairground firing rangeBritain has still got some of the best engineers in the World, so has Europe, the rules of the UK are difficult, we are a small island with too much congestion. The accountants run the traffic office and the extra weight that can be carried by using single tag axles or mini second steer axles pays benefits to the bottom line.
I give you a choice, your favoured double drive bogie with eight tyres, two diffs and heavy leaf springs or an extra 700kg payload?
The trucks I drove before going out to Africa had either steering mid axle or just two axles. and the trailer had 2 lifting axles, some trailers lifted axles one and two, others lifted one and three. This also gave a big benefit to the cost of toll charges.
Taken from a random internet search, kind of agrees with my take on it.
6x4 Double Drive tractor units with twin wheels (44 tonnes).
In poor site conditions the Double Drive axles (with twin wheels) give unequalled levels of traction and stability. Although there is a slight sacrifice in payload due to the extra weight, these tractors will go where others fear to tread! This allows James Booth to virtually guarantee they will deliver, even in the most difficult conditions.
6x2 Mid-lift tractor units (44 tonnes).
The industry standard, this configuration maximises payload at 44 tonnes and offers reduced tyre wear. The rear-most axle is driven on twin wheels, and suitable for all but the harshest site conditions.
Our trailers are fitted with a lifting front axle and steering rear axle to minimise tyre wear and give us a decent payload
Seems to me to have missed everything I said concerning the axle weight needed to give the right amount of traction with a single drive axle with,what is effectively,a 4x2 with an auxiliary axle just to provide for an extra 4 tonnes which then reduces the drive axle weight below the type of acceptable levels needed for guaranteed traction in all conditions unless the drive axle is overloaded by dumping/transferring weight from the undriven auxiliary axle.It’s also a lot easier to load a trailer so that it spreads it’s load equally across two drive axles of a 6x4 unit than it is to provide a heavier load on the single drive axle of a 6x2 and a lighter load on the undriven axle.However I’ve already posted some evidence on here that the argument about tare weights of 6x2 units versus 6x4 ones is subjective and innacurate having shown that it’s possible to find 6x4 units which actually have lower tare weights than comparable 6x2 units.In addition to that the argument,concerning 6x2 44 tonne artics being more road friendly than 4x2 40 tonners,is a flawed one unless 6x4 axle configuration is used to allow lower drive axle weights.It’s up to the government to reflect that in 6x4 friendly road and fuel taxation to compensate for the (arguable) extra fuel costs of using that configuration.Although allowing the type of LHV drawbar outfits which I’m proposing would allow even more use to be made of the traction and axle weight advantages of both the drawbar outfit idea’s better weight distribution on the road and the 6x4 driveline configuration which would probably pay for itself in payload advantages and therefore fuel efficiency that’s even before the road friendly advantages are taken into account.But as for that fairground firing range it all depends on how far away the target was set and what type of hardware that the fairground range was using in comparison to the opposition from the rest of the world.
Here’s the thing though. If you have a midlift then you can dump the air in that axle to put more weight on the drive axle to help with traction. If you have twin drive then you are always going to have the problem of reduced weight on the driving wheel… (only one wheel drives in normal conditions, same as a single axle) so you stand more chance of losing traction on the highway.
The only place I really feel you need twin drive is on the ice when you drive onto or off the lakes and the shoreline is often a large step onto a hill. In that situation, having an axle lock makes all the difference.
Now your “proposal”, which is really nothing new and is now considered less desired than artics, means that you will have more potential slack which is more potential for trouble. You clearly don’t have real snow and ice time behind you, no matter what you claim, because you would find your “proposal” as laughable as I do.
I think, for highway use here, a lift axle single drive would be very good. Less heat, less weight, less power drain through the transmission and driveline. The 6x4s have their uses, and are generally accepted as the norm here. It doesn’t mean they are necessarily any better or worse.
YAWN NTSA.
bobthedog:
… the UK or Europe. Croomes ran drawbars, .
Croomes still do .
I parked behind one 2 days ago, as the driver was doing his own wheel change after a blowout , 6 x 2 and drag drawbar
LT registered with Rom` drivers , still based with operations from Isle of Sheppey i understand , least thats where their fitter who came told me he was based at. 
Right then Crazyfacts, just to put your 6x4 theory to bed once and for all, I have real life experience of how crap they are, just last night whilst crossing a mountain pass in Idaho I nearly got myself stuck to the point of needing to chain up, just a bit of freezing fog, a couple of inches of snow, a light load and I was going nowhere, all 8 tyres just spun as there was nothing pushing them into the road, I have nearly new drive tyres which look just like these
As you can see they have an open shoulder design, so are perfect for clearing snow…if there’s enough weight to push them into the road, a lift axle would’ve made life far easier for me
Now your contemptuous 6x4 ideas will have to travel around unladen at times, maybe even lightly loaded for your complete trip to wherever you dream of going, WTF are you going to do then? Any trip beyond the shores of the UK will see you in snow at some point, going east you will be stuck 50 miles past Brussels, south and you’ll struggle past Auxerre, that’s if you get up the Medway Hill in the first place to even reach the boat
I know you got your fascination of 6x4s from your time at the council, but you were hardly likely to come a cropper there were you, after all your 6x4 had a 'king great big snow plough on the front of it
Is it me or is carryfast the driver you would not want to park up with where does he get all this from he turns a simple question into war and peace.
newmercman:
Right then Crazyfacts, just to put your 6x4 theory to bed once and for all, I have real life experience of how crap they are, just last night whilst crossing a mountain pass in Idaho I nearly got myself stuck to the point of needing to chain up, just a bit of freezing fog, a couple of inches of snow, a light load and I was going nowhere, all 8 tyres just spun as there was nothing pushing them into the road, I have nearly new drive tyres which look just like these
As you can see they have an open shoulder design, so are perfect for clearing snow…if there’s enough weight to push them into the road, a lift axle would’ve made life far easier for meNow your contemptuous 6x4 ideas will have to travel around unladen at times, maybe even lightly loaded for your complete trip to wherever you dream of going, WTF are you going to do then? Any trip beyond the shores of the UK will see you in snow at some point, going east you will be stuck 50 miles past Brussels, south and you’ll struggle past Auxerre, that’s if you get up the Medway Hill in the first place to even reach the boat
I know you got your fascination of 6x4s from your time at the council, but you were hardly likely to come a cropper there were you, after all your 6x4 had a 'king great big snow plough on the front of it
But the important bit there is that you were nearly stuckpeteman not totally stuckpeteman .But I’m not sure if you’ve changed your truck since,but the last time we had a similar discussion,wire said that he would’nt want to run anything that was’nt 6x4 whereas you said you’d prefer to have a 6x2. At which point it turned out that your guvnor had ‘forgot’ to fit the thing with both diff and crosslocks unlike his guvnor. But no those gritter ploughs don’t usually bother with the plough in most cases unless the snow is deep enough to have already stopped every 4x2 and 6x2 artic on the road wether they’re fully freighted or not. But in most cases those 6x4 gritters work just fine in a lot more than a couple of inches of snow,without ever using chains which they don’t even carry anyway,and they don’t abandon them when they’re empty at the end of a gritting run either .I’ve never seen one yet which could’nt make it home empty to load up for the next run.But I know the way that they can run up Reigate Hill empty,let alone with a full load on,in zb weather,which should be enough to get down to Dover if required assuming that it was pulling an empty 45 foot trailer behind it as well. At which point it would be great fun to stop and tell all of those stuck artic drivers to get on with it because a bloke called wheelspin said so.
Well having been watching this for a while I’m going to venture into the fray! So let’s get this straight, is this Carryfast gentleman basing his overwhelming love of 6x4’s on a stint at the council driving gritters 25 years ago?! If so he seems a bit over the top in his arguments for them.
I have a fair bit of 6x4 experience myself, working for London Waste, so UK experience to boot, on artics. And driving Fodens, Volvos and Scanias. On a landfill they are, in my experience, not much better than the tags that used to go in there. Remember that, better, but not much. They were absolutely, all those makes, dreadful on fuel. Admittedly they were driven hard but so is my current 6x2 and it’s in another league, plus it has mountains to contend with. On the road they were ok, unless it had been raining or was even slightly slippy, then they became a right handful on roundabouts and sharp bends. Try and pull away sharpish empty in the dry and they rip the tyres to shreds.
I dare say you’ll come up with some spurious arguments to discount what I’m saying but it’s all from my own personal experience. 6x4’s may have there uses but full time road work isn’t one of them and I certainly wouldn’t be giving up my mid lift twin steer for one.
i thought this was about lift axles not 6x2 or 6x4. But while we’re on subject how much is the mpg between the 2 running fully loaded say. Lol