On 12/07/2014 8:06 AM, Pete C. wrote:

dpb wrote:

On 12/02/2014 10:04 PM, Ignoramus16418 wrote:
On 2014-12-03, Pete wrote:
...


I believe there is some setup for semis that can give you a reasonable
load weight reading from the pressures in the air suspension. Not truck
scale accuracy, but close enough to keep you out of trouble I think. You
can probably find info on them and hack together your own variant of it.

It wouldn't hurt to give your driver a structural steel book, some
calipers and a tape measure. Not that difficult to measure say I beam
width, height, flange and web thickness and look in the book to find the
pounds per foot, then multiply by the length and get a pretty accurate
weight on the piece you are getting ready to load onto the truck. You
could probably use your programming skills to make a nice smartphone /
tablet app to do this and perhaps even make some money selling the app.

Thiis is interesting. Both the truck, as well as a couple of my
trailers, have air ride suspension. I think that the pressure in the
suspension bags is directly proportional to the weight. I think that
all I need to do, is install pressure gauges connected to the bags,
and have a conversion table, and I am done!

Are they really 100% air-supported? I don't know they're not; just
thought there would be a separate parallel mechanical support path as
well...altho I guess it only changes the proportionality constant unless
it's nonlinear. Which could still calibrate albeit not with single
constant.

The grain trailers here nor the tractor aren't so don't have a comparison...


Proportional enough that there are commercial load scale products for
it. The RWLS stuff says it reads to 100# increments which isn't bad vs.
the 20# increments of a typical CAT scale.

That doesn't say anything about what the calibration curve actually
looks like, though...can calibrate a very nonlinear response as noted
above...

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