A special treat came my way last week when I met up with Tom and Debbie Berkel to tour their brand new Double Eagle sleeper — more like a house than a sleeper, actually. A veteran husband and wife driving team that’ve worked 26 years for Mercer Transportation, they had longed to make their 13-year old Kenworth a true “home away from home” for some time — and now they’ve made their dream come true.

And what a sleeper! It containers a shower, fold-down double bed, double sink, refrigerator and freezer, microwave and convection oven, flat screen TV, and just tons of cabinets. Their satellite TV can be adjusted from inside the truck, so Tom doesn’t have to go out into bad weather anymore, get up on the roof, and manually manipulate the satellite dish himself. The decor just makes it feel like home, too — with the walls and ceilings a nice soft off-white and the cabinets a rich wood grain. The flooring is pergo, so it looks like wood, though Tom put a real wood floor in the driving compartment.

Best of all are the “little touches” that make it feel like home: characters from the movie “Finding Nemo” inhabit the shower, while the cabinets have lady bug, Mickey Mouse, and beautiful rose-shaped knobs — the rose knobs a tribute to Debbie’s mom, who passed away three years ago.

OK, so it’s gorgeous — and lots of truckers have sleepers as big and as nice if not nicer. And sure you can debate how a sleeper of this size impacts fuel economy, payload capacity, turning radius, etc. But after talking with Tom and Debbie (absolutely two of the nicest people you’ll ever meet anywhere) you begin to realize just how life-changing a sleeper like this can be to a truck driving team.

“Take the shower — you go into a truck stop shower and you wait in line, and they can be none-too-clean,” Debbie told me. “Having my own shower allows me to clean up when I want, as I need to, without being rushed.” She also noted that their fold-down bed runs down the cab wall, not across the back of the cab, greatly reducing road vibration, so they sleep much better as a result.

Cooking their own meals has been a huge plus, Debbie added, allowing them to eat healthier and save money at the same time. She showed off a freezer packed with roasts and ground beef, as well as bread dough ready to be defrosted for the oven. Fresh baked bread out on the road! You can’t beat that — and Tom said that by eating better and at more regular meal times helped him lose 20 pounds.

Double Eagle’s flexible construction plan also allowed them to lay out the design of their sleeper the way they wanted — without a lot of upcharges. Light fixtures you’d find in a typical home didn’t cost extra to install, for example, enhancing the home-like feel the Berkels were after.

Having this sleeper also allowed them to save money when they took quick vacations at various points across the country as they didn’t need hotel rooms. Tom also installed an extra 40 gallon water tank just for washing his truck, saving him the $60 it typically costs them to run their Kenworth through a commerical facility. And these are only a few of the myriad ways the Berkels make that sleeper pay for itself.

While not every driving team or driver can afford the Berkels’ set-up, the sleeper they’ve created with Double Eagle’s help really shows off a lot of possibilities — especially the ways life on the road can be made easier and more enjoyable for drivers as a whole.

“Consistency is the key.” — Roy Sanders

I got to spend the good part of a day with Roy, taking a tour of International Truck & Engine Corp.’s Garland, TX, truck assembly plant — which is his baby now, since he’s the manufacturing and facilities manager here. Roy’s worked at International for 16 years, with the last three spent here at Garland, so he’s had a front row seat to view an amazing amount of change to the truck building process — changes that are designed to give you, the fleet owner, a more reliable, durable, and higher quality product.

Roy explained that it’s all about consistency — installing a component, painting a cab, spacing the axles and wheel hubs — the right way every single time, hour after hour, truck after truck. International — and every other truck manufacturer, I might add — has spent millions to develop new manufactuing processes to give customers this consistency, yet at the same time preserve much of the customization they demand in their vehicles.

“No two trucks we build here are alike — the are all completely different,” he told me. “A dump truck with tandem rear axles may be followed by a day cab tractor with a single rear axle, followed by a concrete pumper with a tandem rear and tage axle arrangement. That’s a lot of complexity but we need to handle that with the same consistency that the auto manufacturers do.”

Roy’s factory builds mostly severe service, vocational, and military trucks and that range makes attaining consistency that much harder. “We’re dealing with anywhere from 20 to 30 different axle combinations alone on our line — that’s a lot of variation we have to manage,” he said.

Amid the whir and scream of torque wrenches, hoists, and other equipment, Roy explained that every truck OEM is trying to imitate the way the automakers build cars — especially the high end brands, such as Lexus. They want to deliver the same level of product quality, yet in a package durable enough to take more pounding than a Lexus would see in two or three lifetimes.

It’s a very detailed process now, with pre-test checks of components conducted in many cases right after they are installed on a chassis to see if they are working properly. Validation supervisors roam the line conducting their own checks as well, with a series of final checks spaced out at the end of the building process — a 10 minute dyno test for each truck, a quick run over a bump lane to make sure the suspension is solid, and a variety of electronic diagnostics to make sure everything is ship shape, to name but a few.

All of this is geared not only to making trucks better but delivering them to you, the customer, faster. Gone are the days when individual components would be constructed by hand for hours, with the quality of the work depending on how tired the line workers became as the day wore on. Now, pre-made components — called modules — get quickly put into place and tested out, so an entire truck can be built in about an hour and a half. Just building a battery box by hand used to take three hours alone, noted Roy.

“If you had told me five years ago we could do what we are doing today in terms of production speed and quality control, I would have told you it would be impossible,” he said. “But here we are doing it. And it’s all geared to giving the customer a better, more durable product for their business in a much shorter time span. That’s our overriding goal now and for the future.”

Spent some time a few weeks back at Goodyear’s Commercial Tire Academy in Dallas, TX, immersing myself in lots of truck tire details. We all know how important tires are to the safe and cost-efficient operation of heavy trucks today … but frankly, we just don’t think about it that much. Tires are just so taken for granted, not just by truckers but by the driving public at large, that lots of bad things keep happening.

Remember the Ford Explorer-Firestone tire debacle back in 2000? One reason Firestone tires were failing is that Ford recommended that owners run them under-inflated to improve the vehicle’s stability. That violates one of the most basic rules of tire physics — you MUST run them at the proper inflation or risk damaging the tire, leading to premature failure. Or how about the ongoing Chinese light truck debacle? Poorly constructed, unsafe tires enjoy brisk sales because they are cheap — and now NHTSA is trying to get the distributor to recall them, without much luck.

Roy Sutfin, general manager-service for Goodyear’s commercial division, nailed this disconnect dead on during my Dallas visit: “People will spend $200 or more on a pair of shoes in a heartbeat, without a second thought, but then turn around and try to find the cheapest tires possible for their vehicles,” he told me. “Look, from a safety perspective, what’s more important here? Designer footwear or what your vehicle is riding on when you are going 65 mph on the highway? Tires are what your family is riding on and, for truckers, what supports your business. They are extremely important, yet we don’t treat them as such.”

Look at how we take care of tires. An analysis of 1,000 vehicle inspections forms gathered by the Car Care Alliance from 16 states back in January found that 20% of those vehicles had improperly inflated tires, with 11% running on tread so worn out the tires needed replacement. Look at all the ‘gators’ you see driving down the road. Most of that rubber isn’t from recaps, as most truckers know, but from new tire failures due to chronic underinflation — tires than can cost upwards of $350 per unit, but that we can’t seem to keep properly inflated so they’ll last 500,000 miles or more.

Truck tires, especially, are built to take a lot of punishment because the OEMs know how much they’ll suffer over their lifespan. As part of my tire academy visit, I followed around Stan Zucchenlli and Gerald Mike Stout, two longtime tire salemen, as they conducted a tire inspection on a truck and trailer. One of the trailer tires we looked at, from the details branded on its sidewall, was made in 1998 — almost NINE years old, yet there it was, properly inflated and ready for business. Sure, trailer tires are designed to roll for many years, but that still was an impressive sight.

Yet inpsecting truck and trailer tires every day — especially measuring inflation pressure — is no easy thing and the 100-degree Dallas summer weather made the trailer part of the inspection (the truck stood parked in a nice air conditioned maintenance bay) a nasty business. It typically takes about 18 minutes to check the air pressure on all of a tractor-trailer’s 18 tires and it can get to be an irritating daily chore in a hurry, no doubt — one reason why those tire ‘thumpers’ are still around. (Like you can accurately gauge air pressure by hitting a tire — like seeing if the oil level is OK by thumping the truck’s hood. NOT!)

Still, these tires support the whole vehicle as it rolls down the road, have a big impact on overall fuel economy, and are what stops your tractor-trailer when you hit the brakes. Sure, the brakes stop the wheel from moving, but it’s the TIRE that’s connecting the vehicle to the road — and if those tires fail in a panic stop situation, your rims won’t have the grip necessary to even slow down much less stop your rig.

Tires are important — we all know that. It’s just that we need to put more of that ‘knowing’ into practice every day. That’s what will keep truckers safe and save them money, too.

I spent a good part of my life growing up in the little town of Davis, West Virginia — a small hamlet inside Canaan Valley, a now extemely popular spot on the east coast for downhill and cross country skiing, mountain biking, camping and hiking, and all sorts of other outdoor sporting pursuits.

But back when my dad had a small cabin built in 1972 on a parcel of land he bought from local farmer Hank Mallow (one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet), coal and cattle formed the backbone of Davis’ small economy — and little else. The gigantic Mount Storm power plant 10 miles down the road (a smoking concrete behemoth straight out of Blade Runner) steadily employed some of the town’s hardworking souls, but most worked in the mines and on farms, along with a lucky few in the then-new tourist industry.

Over the summers and winters I spent in Davis, I really learned about how deeply woven trucks are into our fabric of life. Only one railroad line runs up into the mountains around Canaan and it just carries coal to feed the big power generating beast at the other end of the valley. Tractor trailers hauling fuel, food, and everything else from soap to band aids ply the narrow, twisting roads up Scheer Mountain into the valley almost every day, giving Davis the necessities it needs to keep functioning.

Trucks also provide the only surefooted means of getting around, too. Every household has a four-wheel drive pickup — most with a snowplow attachment mounted on the front bumper — for Old Man Winter always gives the valley a few wicked storms when he comes through. We got snowed in one year for a week, unable to get my family’s bulky rear-wheel drive Plymouth station wagon out over four foot drifts.

Once, in college, I drove up there in my old Honda Civic (my sister later killed it … but that’s another story) and went skidding off the ice-slicked road in the middle of the night like a hockey puck. Fortunately, the shift was changing at the plant, so the pickups emptied out and I found myself and my Honda literally picked up and put back on the road. (By the way, folks in Canaan are some of the best in the world. I never even had to ask for help that night — everyone just came over, got me back on the road, and went on to work).

Trucks were a fact of life in Davis — and still are. I’ve witnessed more than a few would-be mountain bikers and their AWD Subarus being winched out of ditches and other tough spots along the muddy back roads in Canaan. Our former neighbors, the Martins (they moved back into town) still have a big GMC Jimmy circa 1977 they use to get around in the snow and muck. Might not get the best gas mileage, but it completes the journey. Every time.

I don’t get up to Davis and Canaan as much as I’d like anymore, but the memories are never far away. The countless miles up and down those narrow country roads passing logging trucks, dump trucks, tractor trailers, snow plows, you name it, painted vivid images in brain that always remind me just how important those vehicles are to have around. So while we keep seeking for ways to make them cleaner and sip less fuel , let’s always remember why we have them in the first place. Because without them, daily life would get an awful lot harder.

By now you’ve heard of the battle between NHTSA and New Jersey-based tire importer Foreign Tire Sales (FTS) over the recall of 450,000 Chinese-made car and light truck tires that lack critical ‘gum strips’ that help hold the tread onto the tire’s casing. There are, of course, eerie similarities between this case and the infamous Firestone tire debacle of 2000, where tread separation on Firestone tires mounted on Ford Explorers led to Congressional hearings, executive firrings at Ford and Firestone, the disintegration of the nearly 100-year old partnership between Ford and Firestone, and countless millions in damages and recalled products. What the outcome of the Chinese tire situation will be is anyone’s guess for now.

NHTSA is trying to get FTS to recall all of these defective Chinese tires, which the company at the moment won’t do as it claims the cost of the recall — between $60 million and $80 million — would force it into bankruptcy. FTS is instead suing its Chinese supplier, Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber, to pay for the recall, which is setting up a whole new level of squabbling.

The two companies began jointly designing the tires in 2001, under the brand names Westlake, Telluride, Compass and YKS and market them as replacement radial tires for pickup trucks, sport-utility vehicles and vans. The Washington Post in particular did a good write up on these defective tires, so I won’t go into all the nitty gritty details.

This is only the latest in a string of problems with Chinese goods, such toothpaste contaminated with antifreeze, pet food containing lethal amounts of fertilizer, shellfish rejected due to high levels of mercury, and children’s toys covered in lead paint

I’m not knocking the Chinese, by the way — these are just the facts. They are as hard working and as industrious a people that you’ll find anywhere on this Earth. But I think what really needs to be examined closely here is how our demand in the U.S. for cheaper goods is leading to a rash of defective products reaching the market. And let’s face it, the reason is that everyone’s pocketbook — from the family budget to the corporate bottom line — is getting ferociously squeezed these days.

Fuel prices are spiking up over $3 a gallon, food prices are up, many of us have home mortages that are tripling due to adjustable rates, health care is out of sight, and the list just goes on and on. So no wonder all of us — especially truckers — are looking for lower cost options in our lives. That includes tires for our cars and commercial vehicles.

Back to tires: China is the top exporter of tires to the U.S., according to the Rubber Manufacturer’s Association (RMA), shipping us just under 32 million tires last year. About 40% of all the tires bought new in the U.S. were imported in 2006 by the way, says the RMA, up from 21% just 10 years ago. That gives you an idea of just how attractive lower cost can be when budgetary belts start getting tightened.

Look, these kinds of issues are going to be with us for a very long time — manufacturing and trade are now truly global, whether or not the President gets to keep fast-track authority to make trade deals. It’s a reality of the modern world.

But that doesn’t mean we should get taken completely by surprise here: a seriously cheap tire, like anything else, should be an invitation for much closer scrutiny. And this time it’s a pure product issue. In the Firestone-Ford Explorer situation seven years ago, inflation levels were part of the issue, with tires being run at lower pressures than recommended to help keep the vehicle stable. Nothing like that seems to going on here with these tires, so far — it’s purely a physical defect that’s causing them to fail. That’s why it behooves us to keep an even closer eye on the products we buy from now on.

Maintaining trucks today is a complicated business at best, a confusing nightmare at worst. Part of the probelm is while commerical trucks todat are packed with more electronics than ever before, it’s easy to forget that they still require basic no-nonsense maintenance to keep on humming — regular oil changes, tire pressure checks, etc.

That’s why it’s important to keep Darry Stuart’s name handy in your rolodex, and not just because — after a long and distinguished career — he became the Technology & Maintenance Council’s chairman this year. No, Darry earned his chops the hard way, working on everything from refuse packers to highway trucks for nearly four decades before opening his own firm — Boston, MA-based DWS Fleet Management, which specializes in helping fleets solve maintenance issues.

Darry is a guy who walks and talks like a fleet manager, with a great craggy voice that gives even curse words some class. Best of all, Darry gets right to point — and let’s you know in plain, unvarnished English what you have to do to keep your trucks on the road, as what you better NOT be doing to them.

“You will spend money on maintenance – that’s a given,” Darry stresses to me every time we talk. “The focus for the fleet manager is where — and where not — to spend that maintenance money. Because you can go broke by over-maintaining your equipment, you have to determine the key areas on the vehicle you need to maintain.”

He adds that key maintenance details remain pretty much the same for almost all commercial vehicles [Something he goes into a lot more deeply on his web site, www.darrystuart.com].

“You use the same basic maintenance management philosophy, altering it slightly depending on the needs of a particular application,” he explains. “Using a truck to haul trash is really no different than using a truck to haul freight or whatever. All trucks have batteries, tires, engines, and other components that need to be maintained. The use-pattern of a truck’s particular application just dictates what components you look at first and how often.”

Darry maintains some simple rules of thumb for fleets, rules I’ve noted before in stories written for FleetOwner as well as our sister publication Waste Age . They are simple and, I think, effective ground rules for any fleet to follow, so I think they are more than worth repeating in this space:

Batteries: If the battery charge is low, the truck may not start and so doesn’t even get out of the gate, he says. Stuart stresses that battery cables have to be disconnected and cleaned and load tested at each PM interval and to make sure a full charge is getting through. Of particular concern: low voltage batteries. Though they may get a truck started, low vlotage puts a lot more pressure on the truck’s alternator and starter, leading to a shorter life cycle for those components.

Cooling systems: Truck engines today generate a lot of heat, due to the new emission rules which went into effect this year. So your cooling systems mustbe in top shape – not only can corrosion over time lead to internal engine issues, leaks in the cooling hoses, the high temperatures generated by the engine and other systems can evaporate any traces of coolant leaks, making a repetitive problem that much harder to find. So at every PM, regular pressure testing of the cooling system is a must.

Tires: This is probably one of the most expensive areas for truck maintenance. Darry says the key is to keep tires properly inflated and make sure the front axle is aligned properly to minimize abnormal tire wear. “I stress that you check the front axle ‘toe’ at every PM, because it takes just 5 minutes to check,” he says. “If the toe is out of alignment, you have to adjust it, because that is what accelerates and wears tires out the most.”

U-bolts/fasteners: Darry is a fanatic about tightening chassis and axles u-bolts and wheel/rim fasteners at every PM because. “Trucks endure a lot of vibration from all the maneuvering, turning, heavy loading and unloading they do every day. Those bolts are holding your truck together so you have to watch them,” he says.

Oil and grease: Darry is a big believer in buying the best engine oil and component grease available, simply because they can help add life to your equipment. “Front ends, clutch linkages, and especially u-joints need the best grease you can buy; know what you are buying, buy quality not price,” he says. “If you don’t grease a u-joint regularly, it’s going to blow out on you, and when that happens you have to tow the vehicle in – that’s expensive. That’s why paying attention the small details helps you avoid the big problems in the long run.”

And avoiding problems is really what good fleet management is all about.

Talked with Larry Tucker recently, the commercial tire marketing manager for Goodyear Tire & Rubber, about his company’s DuraSeal product — the self-sealing material that keeps truck tires inflated and ready to roll even if speared multiple times by nails and other road debris through the tread.

This isn’t new — DuraSeal has been out for two years now — but from what I am seeing much of the trucking community isn’t taking advantage of it. Now, you can get your own self-sealing liquids injected into your tires easy — and probably at a lot lower cost, too — but the big, big advantage with DuraSeal that I see is it can be retreaded, whereas the do-it-yourself sealers can’t.

You see, tire retreaders won’t take tires in that have been injected post-sale with self-sealers because those materials are extremely flammable — meaning they explode in the final-stage curing process. And as Tucker told me, “You never want to see a curing chamber fire, or even be near one.”

Keeping a tire’s retreadability, if you will, while still getting self-sealing tread over multiple tire life cycles is a huge benefit to fleets. Avoiding road calls for flats is a big deal, too, because towing fees are not cheap and the cost of downtime in this day and age is even worse.

Now, Tucker told me the fleets best suited for DuraSeal tires obviously remain those that get exposed to road debris more frequently, such as vocational, off-road, waste, and construction fleets. For the guys running linehaul on highway routes every day, the payback may not be as apparent.

But I tell you that may not be true anymore. My wife ran over a couple of roofing staples out on the road the other day — an example that the nice, supposedly debris-clear highways just ain’t so anymore. Luckily for me, we limped her car to our nearby repair shop before the tire went totally flat, but it was a day of downtime for us to get it fixed. That kind of downtime costs fleets a lot of money. So there may be more payback in self-sealing tires for linehaul operators than at first meets the eye.

And finally, any chance to talk with Larry is one you should take — he’s an off-road enthusiast that has tons of great tales to tell, with a bottomless well of tire knowledge to boot. You just can’t beat that combination.

I had the singular honor to help judge a “show truck” competition this year ar Mid America, held by the National Association of Show Trucks (www.nastshowtrucks.org) and sponsored by Truck-Lite. For me, these trucks are much more than mere “chrome and polish” — they are literally rolling works of art, each hand crafted and painted with the unique vision of the truck’s owners.

What makes the NAST contest even more interesting is that trucks of each of the finalists (six in all) are all “working vehicles” — Bob and Shelly Brinker, the winners this year, have over 800,o00 miles on their 2000 Freightliner, dubbed “The Legend of the Black Pearl.” Runner up Ron Huey does them one better — his Silver Eagle International has over one million miles on the odometer.

But is the glitz and glamour worth it? From a purely business perspective, sinking ten grand into paint, chrome, and interior work — plus all the cleaning and washing that goes with it — doesn’t seem to make a lot of fiscal sense in this era of $3 a gallon diesel. And when profit margins hover around 5%, every penny counts, again making all the polish seem like a poor investment choice.

And yet … every truck on the road serves as a billboard for this industry: a huge, rolling exclamation point that the public puts under a microscope every day. Bo Trout, a long time owner operator, NAST member and show truck owner put it to me this way: “If by doing this we change one person’s mental image of trucks and truckers, it’s worth it.”

To Trout and other show truck owners, it’s not about the money — in fact, he said, you can’t do it for money alone because the winner’s purses aren’t that big. “It’s all about pride of ownership and pride in your profession,” Trout explained, then told me this story:

“I have one truck I designed as a tribute to our soliders. One day I had a woman follow me in her car to my freight stop outside an airport. I kept thinking to myself, ‘Uh oh, did I cut her off? Is she angry with me?’ Then she gets out — tears in her eyes — and explains she has relatives serving overseas and wants to thank me for the display in honor of them. A moment like that makes it all worth it.”