Pulling Eagle Ford trailers safely is no task for the faint at heart. Combination vehicles are usually heavier, longer, and require more driving skill than single commercial vehicles. This means that drivers of a vehicle combination like a straight truck with a trailer need more knowledge and skill than drivers of single vehicles. These drivers also need a Combination Vehicle Endorsement on their CDL. To get one, you have to take a written test and a skills test. You’ll have to demonstrate that you know how to handle two characteristics of trailers that make driving a combination vehicle more of a challenge than driving a single vehicle. These are:
- rearward amplification and
- yaw instability.
Eagle Ford Trailers - Rearward Amplification
In the busy production-driven environment of the Eagle Ford Shale oilfield, “crack the whip” usually means, “get busy, get to work!” For drivers of tractor-trailers, however, “crack the whip” has a different meaning.
Federal Motor Safety Oversteer
Trucks with trailers have a dangerous crack-the-whip effect caused by rearward amplification. A quick lane change can cause the trailer to swing out, then swing back, like the tip of a whip. This effect is most severe in double and triple combinations. The last trailer in the combination will be affected the most. The result can be a rollover.
Steer gently and smoothly when pulling trailers. Maintain a generous following distance. Leave at least one second for each ten feet of your vehicle length, plus another second if you’re going over 40 miles per hour. Look far enough ahead to avoid having to make sudden movements. Drive slowly and make lane changes gradually. Keep plenty of space to the sides of the vehicle so you can enter or cross traffic smoothly.
Federal Motor Safety Understeer
Control your speed whether fully loaded or empty. When empty, large combination vehicles take longer to stop than fully loaded ones. When lightly loaded, the very stiff suspension springs and strong brakes give poor traction and make it very easy to lock up the wheels. The trailer can swing out and strike other vehicles.
A tractor can jackknife very quickly. Be careful about driving bobtail tractors which can be very hard to stop smoothly and which take longer to stop than a tractor-semitrailer loaded to maximum gross weight.
When the wheels of a trailer lock up, the trailer will tend to swing around in a trailer jackknife. This is more likely to happen when the trailer is empty or lightly loaded. Stay off the brake. Do not use the trailer hand brake while driving, it can cause a trailer skid.
Once the trailer wheels regain traction, the trailer will start to follow the tractor and straighten out.
Yaw Instability Can Cause a Rollover
“Yaw” means rotation around a vertical axis. In terms of trailers, this vertical axis is the kingpin and it’s where the trailer is joined to the tractor. This connection does not keep the trailer in a fixed, straight line behind the tractor. After all, the whole point of having an articulated vehicle is to create an angle between the tractor and the trailer. That allows the entire rig to take curves and corners.
However, this flexibility can cause problems called “yaw instability” or “snaking.” Sometimes this swaying, or oscillation, can cause a rollover. As the speed at which you’re traveling increases, your trailer or trailers will start to sway from side to side. A sudden steering maneuver can also lead to instability. Several factors can contribute to yaw instability such as:
- the condition of your tires
- the stiffness of the suspension
- the placement of the fifth wheel
- the distribution of cargo
Load cargo and pre-trip your rig with care. Use caution when passing vehicles on the highway or going around a sharp corner. Don’t understeer or oversteer.
If you have an interests in driving in the Eagle Ford, be sure to visit our South Texas Oilfield Jobs page and Devorah's website linked in her bio below.
Crack the whip is an idiom that may be older than you think. We will examine the meaning of the idiom crack the whip, where it came from, and some examples of its use in sentences.
Crack the whip means to push someone to work harder, to demand more work from someone or that someone work faster or longer. A boss who is known to crack the whip is unreasonable. Usually, one can not satisfy a boss who will crack the whip. The idiom crack the whip is derived from a literal phrase, crack the whip, that came into use at least as early as the 1600s. This phrase describes the literal cracking of a whip over a horse’s head to startle him into obeying. The idiom crack the whip came into use sometime in the latter-1800s. Crack the whip is also a well-known children’s game that involves children holding hands in a chain. The lead child runs in random patterns across an area, dragging the line of children behind him so that the formation resembles a cracking whip. Related phrases are cracks the whip, cracked the whip, cracking the whip.
Examples
Somebody has to crack the whip over the company’s messy efforts, and the hedge fund Elliott Management raised its hand this week for the job. (The Wall Street Journal)
With 63 clauses of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019, coming into effect from September 1, the Centre is all set to crack the whip on some of the most common traffic violations across the country. (The Indian Express)
In his capacity as the chair of the Gauteng ANC caucus, provincial premier David Makhura issued a stern warning to cadres deployed in local government – the party is going to “crack the whip” on all problems facing local government in the province, especially on issues relating to corruption and mismanagement. (The Daily Maverick)
From cave-bound Indiana Jones-style action to otherworldly sequences that play out like the third act of Poltergeist (the PG-rated horror on which writer-producer Spielberg cracked the whip), Muschietti draws heavily on the ETdirector’s back catalogue. (The Guardian)
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It takes a dexterous hand to coax a whip to crack. Now researchers report that they have discovered the mechanism responsible for the startling sound. It has long been thought that the crack results from the tip of the whip traveling fast enough to break the sound barrier and create a sonic boom. But the new findings suggest otherwise. Apparently, it's the loop in a whip that is the real noisemaker.
Though by no means a master whip cracker, Alain Goriely of the University of Arizona was nonetheless intrigued by the phenomenon and set out to study it at a theoretical level. Together with Tyler McMillen, a graduate student in applied mathematics, he modeled the behavior of the leather strips in a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters. Previous whip work (one of just three papers on the subject in the past century) had resulted in the puzzling observation that the sonic boom occurs when the tip of the whip is traveling at about twice the speed of sound. But if the tip were truly the cause of the crack, why wasn't the sound heard earlier, when the tip first reached the speed of sound? Goriely and McMillen's calculations have revealed the answer. "The crack of a whip comes from a loop traveling along the whip, gaining speed until it reaches the speed of sound and creates a sonic boom," Goriely says. He notes that even though some parts of the whip travel at greater speeds, "it is the loop itself that generates the sonic boom."
Although the whip's tip has lost the distinction of being the source of the menacing crack, it is still a force to be reckoned with: according to Goriely's calculations, "the tip can reach speeds more than 30 times the initial speed [of the whip]."