Just another day at work in the Pilbara... (<span class="highlight">bush</span> <span class="highlight">mechanics</span>)

Gday Matthew
I remember back in the seventies , one of our road trains had run out of spare wheels and returned back to base at the end of the trip with both second steer wheels chained up .
Murray

actually a common "stop gap" for trucks/trailers, some suspension systems are set up to lift the rear set clear of the ground when empty .....
So what do you do up there Matt, i worked for the Ashburton shire for a while and loved it out there, even better in the cooler months but still a nice place eh ........ take a metal dector with you, still a lot of gold around out there and kills time in the late arvos, if ya can put up with the flies that is.
Cheers
Joe

Would have been more fun if it had been a single axle!!!.....LOL'


cheers,

Whilst the boss may have come up with the idea of doing this, sure bet he's probably seen this on semi trailers, so not his original idea. Wheel bearings do fail on semi trailers too and this is how you keep the show on the road.
I've had to do this twice, fortunately both times in a tri group.

Cheers,
Dion.

Yeah, did a similar thing with an old lazy axle ACCO. Driving through loose sand on the Jigalong road. As the rear wheel sank, the lazy was taking load off the drive causing it to skip on the spot, going nowhere, chained the lazy axle up with wheels removed so the drive would work.

This is fairly common repair, I recently saw it on the Sturt Hwy after a local semi ran a wheel bearing.

A few weeks ago I was waiting for the ferry across the Zambezi to Livingstone in Zambia.
A semi came across the ferry with one of the axles chained up on the LH side on the prime mover, which was a full size truck. It had all the studs broken off.

I took quite a while to get on and off the ferry as the truck was catching on the ramp . The driver was pretty good as he reversed off over some sleeper type wood placed in the gap.
I am still wondering about how the Falcon XF ? Outback ute got to be abandoned in the customs area. maybe a Niigerian letter or Debbi working offshore bought it on ebay.
Regards Philip A

Cruisemaster suspensions as set up on our caravan will run on one wheel if you take one of the tandem wheels off.

Independand axles each side for this van,,, but the secret is the rocker on the axle with the tyre/wheel on, the spring rests on the chassis rail.

You could achieve the same by jamming a piece of hardwood or steel in the rocker in your picture above.

As you say its happenned before and it'll happen again.

Matthew, workarounds are important innovative procedures at times. Care needs to be taken however.

We had a wagon here for feeding cattle about 10 years ago. Really troublesome as it had a load sharing rocker with dual axles. Turning with it broke up wheels around the rim so the centres let the air out in a big way. That meant the rocker let the flat onto the ground until there was a lump of red gum under the chassis.

We have a Deutz tractor here that has been used with some pressure over the front tyres or puncturing with a stick. As it was a 2wd with smaller fronts and I drove it home more than once with the flat side chained up or the other side blocked down with a lump of wood. Pretty dicky on three wheels as the opposite rear wheel would bounce off the ground in some rough ground but getting to the workshop was important.

Mind you, when we had a "professional" guy turn up to trailer our 4by out a few years ago and he knew the road in was rough. I was very bleep ed off when he arrived with broken springs in his trailer. He had no workaround but get a truck from another direction. That delayed collection another day from an EO National Gathering.