Posted by Matt Wilson on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 2:08PM :
In Reply to: Re: Undersized brakes on new 3/4 -!ton Trucks?? posted by MoparNorm on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 10:47AM :
Sounds like your acquaintance was a little slow on the draw, ha, ha! I absolutely agree with you when you say a person cannot constantly overload a truck and expect it to last. At the place where I used to work, I remember a guy who brought in his company truck with a broken frame. He wanted our shop to weld it back together. It turns out that his boss was too cheap to buy a new truck, and also too cheap to buy a truck with adequate carrying capacity. His truck was a 1/2-ton and was way overloaded on a daily basis. He had burned up a rear end, broken and flattened out the leaf springs, and now the frame was broken into two pieces. He said his boss never would get the picture. Sad story.
Anyway, I did weigh my truck almost empty one time (still had all fluids, was mostly full of fuel, had grill guard, bed liner, headache rack, a few tools, and me in it, too), and it weighed something like 4500 lbs. That left about 1600 lbs for carrying other stuff. Not good for carrying 3000 lbs of dirt, but hey, it does most of what I need.
Maybe someday I'll graduate to a bigger truck....naw, this one's paid for and runs well. Doesn't cost me much, even at 200,000 miles.
Matt