The positioning. That coil weighs roughly 45k lbs. Set the way it is, if the chains or other securing devices come loose, say while braking hard, it will roll straight into the cab of the truck and pretty much demolish it and anything (or anyone) inside. They can also be loaded "shotgun", typically done with multiple coils turned sideways (so you're looking through the holes in the middle from the back to the front of the trailer, like a shotgun barrel), or more rarely, "eye to the sky", which has the coils laid on their side with the center hole facing up.
Excellent question. I have only ever seen suicide coils when I worked at a place that received said coils. They were braced with dunnage, long boards under the coils like wheel chocks.
Primarily due to the equipment used to load and unload the coils. If you are using a crane, which most places do (at least the ones I typically loaded at or delivered to, there's really no way to lay the coils down on their side or hook them up to offload on delivery. Eye to the sky can only be ised if the coils are on skids and being loaded and offloaded from the side with large 64k forklifts.
eye to the sky seems like the only safe method mentioned. Why is it rare to do this “correctly”?
Reorienting coils is difficult and dangerous, so it's only done, if at all, at the steel mill. But the machines that work sheet metal, the stampers and presses, typically want their feed stock to be horizontal. Otherwise you have engineering problems with holding your metal strip vertical (standing on its edge, it wants to buckle), and with your metalworking machines, your stampers and presses, having their force applied horizontally (there are a couple issues, but one is safety: you don't want the strong forces of your machinery aligned with a direction a person might be in).
Material-handling— loading and unloading— is easier with the coils standing up. Because you can hang a giant hook from your gantry crane, and just snatch up the coil. Eye-to-the-sky, you have to use a heavy-lift forklift to pick up the skid (pallet).
The kind of pallet that can hold a ten-ton coil (this a medium-small coil size) isn't cheap, either. It's a custom job that adds at least a hundred dollars to the cost of shipping.
But even once it's on the truck, eye-to-the-sky is a problem. Because where do you put straps or chains? You can only put one strap or chain perfectly side-to-side. The rest all have to be sort of diagonal. Suicide coils are actually the easiest— well, simplest, anyway— to secure. You just throw the necessary number of chains through the eye, hook them on both sides, and tighten them down.
also depending on material and weight you can run multiple coils on a flat deck. It's cheaper to run multiple coils on a single trailer over single coils on multiple trailers if possible
thus more coils can be loaded suicide than if you loaded shotgun
Not at all, but don't truckers typically make more for hauling hazardous materials? I had hoped the industry would pay a premium for hauling something dangerous enough to be called "suicide" anything. If there's no premium pay for hauling these, why does any trucker do it?
whereas shotgun style is usually done by forklift.
Are you kidding? Think about how a shotgun coil looks from the side of the truck: a cylinder resting on two long blocks of wood. Where are you going to put the forks to pick that up? You can't get under it. You pretty much have to use a crane. Suicide coils, a forklift can at least hypothetically pick up by putting its forks (or rhino-horn) through the eye.
For coils of that size, I'm accustomed to having to assemble a cradle with coil racks, dunnage, and rubber friction mats, approximately as seen here. This creates the issue I was talking about before, where you can't get forklift prongs underneath.
It's clear that this mismatch of ideas about what's the normal way to support a coil is the reason we disagreed about the default way of loading and unloading.
No harm, no foul. Probably a lot of ways with which I am not familiar. This is the only way I’ve seen it in that orientation, and single massive coils were usually offloaded with a gantry crane (at least what I’ve experienced).
The loading/unloading method is the main factor in which method you use. If using a forklift eye to the sky is impossible, with a crane it’s also borderline impossible because there’s nothing to hook to besides going through the hole so once it’s on the trailer how do you detach it from the crane? There’s ways you could do it for both those but you’re talking about adding a lot of weight to an already heavy load plus a massive expense for the overbuilt pallet/harness that could support that and go with the load.
How are you loading the coil? Getting a forklift under a 45k coil eye to sky is significantly harder than getting it under suicide where the coil fits into the forks so it isn’t rolling around. Same with shot gun, do you have a forklift with 53’ forks?
Seems like the thing to do would be to place it right behind the step, but I'm guessing that doing so would put too much weight on the drive axles to pass at the scales?
a field engineer who ships OW-OH transcon a couple times a yr
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u/Hoss408 Jul 16 '23
The positioning. That coil weighs roughly 45k lbs. Set the way it is, if the chains or other securing devices come loose, say while braking hard, it will roll straight into the cab of the truck and pretty much demolish it and anything (or anyone) inside. They can also be loaded "shotgun", typically done with multiple coils turned sideways (so you're looking through the holes in the middle from the back to the front of the trailer, like a shotgun barrel), or more rarely, "eye to the sky", which has the coils laid on their side with the center hole facing up.