Maintenance is one area that is changing more rapidly than any other aspect of the industry. Rigs are becoming increasingly complicated and more and more dependent on electronic technology. Many companies are leasing rather than purchasing their rigs, and those that are purchasing are buying extended warranties. With these changes, a division between tracking operations is beginning to form.
In-House Shops
At one time, almost all carriers employed their own shop, with their own full-service mechanics. Today, many companies that once depended on an all-purpose, in-house diesel mechanic for all repairs are shifting toward an individual dedicated to simply maintaining the vehicle, while leaving the high-tech and heavy-duty mechanical repair to the dealerships.
At the same time, some carriers are looking at the enormous expense of purchasing new equipment and opting instead to continue to maintain their own. These firms are hiring full-line mechanics to meet their needs. Most companies with full-service shops today run a split fleet of company trucks and owner/operators. While the shop also services company-owned equipment, much of the revenue generated to pay shop expenses is earned from servicing owner/operator trucks, whose drivers pay for the maintenance.
This dual direction works in the favor of anyone interested in mechanics and maintenance. The field is expanding and more and more, especially in the bigger shops, specialization is beginning to take place. At the same time, vocational/technical schools across the country are teaching skills that can readily be applied within the framework of almost any shop at any level.
Maintenance Technician
The maintenance technician is charged with keeping the machinery in optimum condition. It is also his or her job to keep records and to note any problems before they develop into major headaches. For instance, everyone knows that oil changes are necessary for maintenance, whether it's a truck or the family car. However, a sharp maintenance technician can spot some problems in the development stage by studying the used oil during an oil change. In fact, the industry now relies on high-tech equipment to test used oil to ascertain ring and bearing wear, fuel inconsistencies, and a dozen other problems that are apparent from the aroma, consistency, and quality of used oil as it is drained from the vehicle.
In simpler times, a maintenance technician was trained in- house and gradually worked from a trainee position to maintenance and, eventually, to mechanic. Due to the high-tech nature of the business, this practice is beginning to disappear and be replaced by trained technicians from vocational- technical schools who are further trained, oftentimes, in specialized schools run by engine manufacturers such as Cummins or Detroit.
Maintenance includes far more than just the engine. It includes every item on the vehicle, from signal lights to wheel lugs. Each repair that has to be made on the road costs the company time, wages, and money and companies depend on their maintenance teams to prevent these costly breakdowns. It is vital to the company's bottom line of profit to ensure that their vehicles leave the terminal not only in optimum mechanical shape, but also in condition to pass the various DOT and ICC requirements the state and federal governments impose.
Surprise vehicle inspections at weigh stations and checkpoints across the country are becoming increasingly common. While it falls to the safety person to make sure both driver and vehicle meet the safety standards of the area where the rig operates, it is the maintenance person's responsibility to make sure that the vehicle itself is fully operational and safe to send out onto the road.
Mechanic
In addition to the maintenance technician, there is a second type of maintenance person. This is the full-fledged truck mechanic who is capable of tearing down an engine or transmission, repairing or rebuilding it, and getting the rig back in shape to hit the road once more. As mentioned earlier, vehicles are getting more complicated each year, and many companies have moved away from an in-house, full- service repair shop. The cost of purchasing the new high- tech testing equipment-much of which now requires computer knowledge-and the cost of training fully certified mechanics as new innovations hit the market can be very high.
However, even as equipment costs continue to climb, there is some evidence of a comeback of the fully rated truck mechanic. Not every company can justify the $100,000-plus outlay for a new truck and trailer every few years. These operations require considerably more than a general maintenance technician. Yet, no one starts out as a fully qualified mechanic, and one of the best routes to attaining this level is by beginning as a maintenance person and working up from there. Thus a trained mechanic is valuable both for his or her own work and as someone who can train the rest of the maintenance staff.
Earnings and Training
Wages are, at the very least, interesting in the maintenance area. They range from a paltry $7 an hour for an absolute untrained beginner to figures approaching $65,000 for shop foremen in major operations. And maintenance is one field where there will always be a demand for workers.
Today's trucking operations seem to prefer to hire their maintenance people from vocational-technical trade schools. The reasoning is that these students have at least a rudimentary grounding in the basic skills required to perform maintenance on trucks. It is common for companies to invest a great deal of money in tuition for specialized courses to get their maintenance staff certified and trained. Courses range from TIG welding to original engine manufacturing classes.
Visit any full-service truck shop today and you will more than likely see various diplomas and certificates framed and displayed on the office walls. Many companies do not see additional training as an expense, but as an investment. Of course, company sponsored training is an obvious way to learn the ropes and gain valuable hands-on experience if you want to eventually own your own business.
Drawbacks
Like most work, maintenance is a job with some drawbacks. Obviously, you may face hard physical demands with the job. It's one of the few areas of trucking where muscle is sometimes required. It can also be a high-pressure occupation. Very often, a tractor or trailer will stop at the shop en route and loaded. Suddenly you'll find yourself working under a tight deadline to get a rig road-ready and back under a load within a matter of hours. It's not at all unusual to see an impatient driver pacing up and down a waiting area waiting for maintenance to finish with the truck so he or she can get back on the road and earn a living.
And, as you might guess, maintenance is not a job for people who dislike getting their hands dirty. Trucks ooze, seep, leak, drip, and dribble, and the older a unit becomes, the more common this behavior seems. You'll also find drivers who take care of their truck like it was one of their own children, and others who will make you seethe because their rig will exhibit half a dozen problems that could have been fixed or prevented if the driver had only taken a second to check the vehicle. Frustration comes with the territory.
A Typical Day's Work
To gain an idea of what maintenance entails, let's take a look at some of the routine tasks a mechanic might encounter on any given day working for a company with leased vehicles or trucks under extended warranty.
As the trucks come in from the road, they are checked into maintenance, and generally the driver is asked to complete an inspection or "gripe" sheet. It is, in fact, a list of items that the driver knows need attention. One of the most common "gripes" is "vibration," which is often a case of misaligned or unbalanced wheels, but can be caused by a number of other things, like a bearing going bad in the drive shaft, uneven tire wear, or an imbalance in fuel distribution causing uneven firing within the cylinders. Drivers tend to have an aversion to paperwork, and it can be something of a challenge to figure out what a driver means by, "It makes a funny noise in third gear," or some equally cryptic comment. Often a maintenance technician must interview the driver to obtain details. In short, the technician becomes a detective.
Trucks do vibrate. It's a fact of life, and most operate in excess of 100,000 miles each year. This translates to more than 2,000 hours of operation, which means that everything from mirror mounts to suspension parts are subjected to a constant vibration. This, in turn, tends to cause things to loosen or wear. Although drivers perform a pre-trip inspection, it is not as detailed as the inspection maintenance personnel must make. Something as simple as a loose mirror bracket is, at the very least, irksome and, at worst, a major safety hazard.
The average truck/trailer combination has about 31 lights, ranging from signal lights to marker lamps. One manufacturer claims that the average road unit contains as much as 22 miles of wire, all of it subject to the rigors of those 2,000 hours of road operation. The electrical system is one of the first areas a maintenance technician will check. It is also, almost all maintenance people agree, one of the most exasperating systems to service and repair. Finding a short or a loose connection in that huge mass of wire can represent a major challenge, especially if an amateur mechanic has been working on it before and jury-rigged the system to make it function.
Unfortunately, the electrical system is also an area that DOT inspectors always check during vehicle inspections. A faulty signal or marker can translate into hundreds of dollars in fines, a half-day delay on the road, and the cost of an overpriced roadside service call. To the company, this expense is a bit extreme when something as simple as a loose connection or a burned out bulb may have caused the problem.
As the trucks are checked in, the maintenance foreman or shop foreman will assign a technician to the vehicle and supply him or her with a list of possible problems. There is often a checklist of regular maintenance routines included with the "problem" list, and the technician's job is to go over both lists thoroughly and carefully, repairing or replacing items as necessary. In some of the bigger operations, maintenance technicians specialize, with one handling electrical work; another servicing wheels, bearings, and tires, and so on. In other operations, one technician is assigned one truck and will work on that unit until all the problems are resolved.
Keeping Records
As repairs are made, each part and each labor or test performed is recorded. This is vital for a number of reasons. First, it helps the shop parts room keep track of inventory and lets them know when it's time to reorder standard stock items. These records also tell the chief of maintenance where a truck stands in its maintenance schedule. The chief must see to it that regular maintenance activities, such as oil changes and tire rotations, take place according to this preset schedule. For trucks operating under warranty, this schedule is vital because most warranties are void if routine and regular maintenance is not performed on the vehicle. Maintenance records also inform the chief if a vehicle is showing premature wear, which gives the mechanics a chance to correct the problem before it becomes worse. Premature wear may be a maintenance problem or may indicate a problem with the assigned driver of the vehicle.
Often the head of the maintenance department will receive related information on the unit from bookkeeping, or from wherever records are maintained concerning mileage and fuel consumption. If a truck shows too much fuel usage compared to the rest of the fleet, either it has a mechanical problem, usually within the fuel pump or injection system, or the driver is not operating the vehicle in an economical way and may need to receive a reprimand or specific instructions to rectify the situation. If it's a mechanical problem, and if the company has a policy of rewarding thrifty drivers with fuel bonuses, this aspect of maintenance takes on an even bigger importance. Without it, the company is not fairly compensating the driver of a faulty truck.
New and Used Trucks
Maintenance works with a number of other departments within the company and may also cooperate with businesses outside the immediate company. For instance, the maintenance shop people are constantly on the lookout for bargains for the standard maintenance parts, such as filters or oil. In addition, maintenance almost always reports to purchasing as trucks enter and leave the shop. Mileage and maintenance records are passed on to the purchasing department and are used to make decisions about when to sell off a truck from the fleet and replace it with a new one. For many companies, this decision is based on a preset number of miles-usually 350,000 to one million-when they feel the truck's dependability may be decreasing and the cost of major maintenance and repairs on the truck is a less sound investment than replacing the vehicle with a new one.
Again, here is a primary reason to maintain and compile accurate and thorough records on a vehicle. To the purchaser of a used truck, vehicle mileage is less important than the availability of shop records. These records indicate not only what has been done to the vehicle over its lifetime, but what hasn't been done, which often is more significant than what repairs have taken place recently. For instance, a tractor may have 500,000 miles-a figure that is only middle-aged for a truck-but if it has never had an in-frame engine overhaul, the truck will need this expensive type of service sometime soon. For a buyer, this makes a major difference in what he or she may be willing to pay for the vehicle.
In some companies, the disposition of the used vehicles involves a direct link between driver and maintenance. Many companies offer in-house purchasing programs to their drivers. For many operations, this system has proved an expedient and profitable way to remove an older truck from the fleet and, at the same time, help a driver move from the status of a company driver to an owner/operator. It also has the secondary, but no less important, effect of making it more likely that a driver will stay with the company-first because of the opportunity for ownership, and later because the company is financing the used tractor for the driver. In- house purchasing programs are an effective driver retention tool, but only if the trucks are maintained adequately so that drivers know they can depend on their equipment. Very often-almost always, in fact-these drivers will continue to have their trucks maintained in the company shop. In fact, some sales contracts require it.
This requirement may sound a bit like a monopoly, but often it is for both the driver's and the company's protection. Maintenance will perform the same checks and service on the privately owned vehicle as they do on the company rigs. The difference is that these services are charged to the driver, but usually at a reduced rate compared to a standard truck shop.
