FleetMag.com |

There’s another reason to spend two hours and $30 fixing a tire problem on the lot: Keen Transport hauls permit loads, so their trucks can only run during daylight hours. If a truck is sidelined with a flat and the driver can’t get the load delivered by sundown, Hair has got a serious problem.

“You don’t control any costs on your rig. No one does,” he says. “So we try to find anything we can in the yard.”

PRESSURE SENSITIVE

There’s a certain irony in the fact that one of the biggest expenses in any fleet’s maintenance budget is safeguarded by one of the cheapest tools in the garage: the lowly tire gauge.

Hair doesn’t like that one bit, so he insists that his technicians have top-of-the-line gauges that are calibrated on a regular schedule.

“Tires are your second biggest cost, but a lot of fleet guys get cheap,” he says. “I don’t know why, but I see this happen too often: they say, ‘That’s the mechanic’s tool. I’m not buying that. That’s not my expense.’

“So, they make the mechanic buy the gauge,” he goes on. “Now, the mechanic gets on the tool truck an he looks at the tire gauge—that’s not an exciting tool like a socket wrench, and it’s something he’s been told he has to buy. They probably have them from $4 to $20; now which do you think he’s going to buy? Your second highest cost, and you’re going to put it in the hands of a $4 gauge? That’s not a good business decision. In my opinion, gauges are something the company should buy.”

There’s another problem with making technicians buy their own gauges, according to Hair: when the gauge is broken, the technician is slow to shell out money on a replacement. His solution is to buy quality gauges that can be recalibrated from Myers Tire, his favorite vendor, and replace them for his technicians at the first sign of trouble.