Thanks for the reply...now I know what they are looking at....mine are extremely tight! 1" drive 40" breaker bar and cheater pipe.
The nut may be tight on the threads but that does not mean the U-bolt is tight on the frame. It happened once on our truck where during a DOT inspection, not at a scale but at a truck stop by a mechanic there for our carrier's periodic DOT inspection, that a U-bolt (truck body bolt) was found loose but the nut was on so tight (rust) that the bolt had to be cut off and replaced. Even a torch could not break that rusted-on nut loose.
Once at Bordentown, I noticed on another driver's truck that the wooden boards that lie between the truck body and truck frame were way out of position and coming out sideways. After pointing this out to the driver, I learned that this brand new truck had been taken somewhere to have a lift axle or some other major component installed. During that installation, the installer removed some U-bolts but did not replace them. In just a few thousand miles, the truck body was beginning to work its way loose and a catastrophic failure might have happened if the defect had not been noticed. Pretrip inspections are supposed to catch such things but in this driver's case, it did not.
In Indiana, a friend of mine was cited for a loose bolt after a scale cop was able to detect a loose one by using a large crow bar and a great deal of force. When the loose bolt was found, the cop brought the driver under the truck with him to show the loose bolt and how it had been detected. As far as the cop was concerned, he was doing everything right and performing an important public service by detecting the loose bolt and citing the driver.
On a related note, this was when CSA was first beginning to be used and this driver got charged with these points and others from other violations that were found at this stop and others iin a short period of time. He and his wife had served his carrier well for nearly two decades. He knew trucks but in a short stretch of time, he had a string of violations, the nature of which would never be picked up in a pretrip inspection, no matter how thorough.
His carrier called him in to discuss this unusual spike in violations. He was told to do better and he very much wanted to do exactly that. It was very unlike him to receive violations of any kind, let alone a string of them. But as it turned out, the intense inspections and the new CSA regime discouraged him so much that he and his wife got out of trucking and are now happily employed in a non-transportation field.
The CSA people would claim this as a great victory. The new rules forced an unsafe driver off the road, right?
The reality is, he was not an unsafe driver as his long-term driving record showed. He was as great of a professional as anyone could hope to be in this business, but because of things like cops with crow bars and bolts that are not loose, except as might be detected with great leverage and force, these two are no longer available to their carrier or the customers they served.
Be careful, drivers. They really are out to get you.
