On 6 Jan 2004 06:18:06 -0800, (Dave Ficken) wrote:
Gary Coffman wrote in message . ..
if I had a tilt bed, I think I'd
want a steel diamond plate floor. That'd allow things to slide on
and off easier. It's what the rollback wreckers have.

Actually, the roll back trucks used by (professional) Machinery Movers
have Wood decks, not diamond plate.

Jerr-Dan, the largest manufacturer of rollback wreckers, doesn't offer
a wood bed option. You get a choice of either steel or aluminum diamond
plate. If you put wood over the steel bed, you'd have a step to the shop
floor when you rolled the bed back equal to the thickness of the wood.
That would be a nuisance at best when winching the machine on or off.

My new (to me) trailer has a diamond plate deck. First thing I did was
put wood over it. It's real tough to keep a machine from sliding on a
steel deck. The concern is when hitting the brakes, not when sliding
down the ramp unloading. The machines slide nicely down the wood when
you tilt the deck.....nice and slow and easy, the way it ought to be.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, if you don't want the load to move,
you tie it down so it can't. You don't depend on the friction of the bed
surface to hold it in place. Lance Wrecker has moved several machines
for me, and they have regular Jerr-Dan trucks with steel diamond plate
floors. None of the machines have shifted even an inch while they hauled
them, because they tied them down properly so that they couldn't move.

Example, when they moved my mill, they had chains going from the lifting
eye to the four corners of the bed, *and* they put a strap around the base
and ran four more chains to the bed corners. That mill couldn't move top
or bottom while tied down that way. You *might* get by without the lower
set of chains on a wood floor, but I'd rather have them there anyway. So
it is really no more trouble to tie the load down properly on a steel deck
than it is on a wooden one.

Note, I am not trying to claim that steel decks are better than wooden
ones for a machinery mover. I'm just saying that you shouldn't depend
on the friction characteristics of the deck material to hold your machine
on the truck. If it is *possible* for it to move, there's at least some
chance it *will*. So tie it down so there isn't any possible way for it
to move short of something rated for the job breaking.

Gary