Keys To Success For Your Truck Scale

Cardinal Armor Truck ScaleIf you think about it, maintaining your truck scale calibration, keeping your truck scale clean and in good working order and watching out for any operational errors can help ensure that you keep your vehicle scale on track for a solid year of great weighing and perhaps a great year of profits for your business. As you can see from Steve Langford’s  article, a lot of this just makes sense. In some businesses a truck scale is the device that ultimately enables you get what you pay for when buying raw materials as well as making sure that you receive proper payment for your products. An accurate scale is not only necessary to maintain profitability but to comply with applicable local and state weights and measures laws. For most of us, the purchase of a truck scale is a major investment and, when you consider its use, it only makes sense to make sure the scale continues to do its job and to help maximize your profits for many years to come.  Let’s take a look at some of the ways to do just that.

Perhaps the best advice to ensure that your truck scales continue to meet your expectations is to be proactive. Don’t wait until your scale is out of calibration before calling your service company. Have your scale’s calibration checked at regular intervals. How often? How long can you go with an inaccurate scale causing you to pay for material you don’t get or to give product away? At a minimum, a truck scale’s calibration should be checked by a reputable scale service company at least once every six months. Between calibration checks, keep an eye on the readings to make sure that the readings stay within the ballpark and are not obviously wrong. If there’s any question, call your scale service company. It’s better to spend a few dollars verifying the calibration of your scale than to loose thousands or more with an inaccurate scale.

Truck scales are designed to maintain calibration, within predefined limits, over a range of temperatures but calibration can vary from winter to summer. If you are in an area subject to temperature extremes, it is a good idea to schedule the calibration of your scale to coincide with the temperature extremes. Granted, the scale may still be in calibration and only slightly high or low but, the greater the number of weighing operations, the greater the influence on your bottom line. Keep in mind that you are obligated to keep the calibration as close to a zero error as reasonably possible so that the scale favors neither the buyer nor the seller. Why would an honest business owner want it any other way? Continue reading

What Preventative Maintenance Is Required For Truck Scales Used In Metal Recycling Businesses?

Let’s say you purchased this heavy duty truck scale for your metal recycling business. Now that you have got this truck scale, what preventative routine maintenance is required for weighing scales employed in recycling applications?

Typical preventive servicing requires washing out beneath the scale deck using a high-pressure hose for routine cleaning. With your Cardinal EPR truck scale, bumper bolts and checkrods will need to be tweaked every quarter on account of expansion and contraction in the scale caused by temperature changes. That is one reason why it is a good idea to set up your truck scales for quarterly scale service agreement check ups. With this agreement in place, you can save on labor and mileage charges and keep your scale adjusted, calibrated, and working throughout the year.

Blue Blanket Truck Scale Warranty

It doesn’t matter if we are looking to buy a computer or a treadmill, we all want to buy a product that has a solid warranty. Often times that warranty will only cover the parts that might break, leaving you to pay for the extra expenses like labor and travel mileage. Well, Avery Weigh-Tronix has now added an optional warranty which will be ideal for many truck scale customers. They call it the Blue Blanket truck scale warranty and for just a small investment, the optional 5-Year Blue Blanket Truck Scale Warranty can be the perfect choice for a customer to protect their investment.

The new ‘blue blanket’ warranty option can really add another dimension of long-term value to your AWTX truck scales. If you were to add this additional protection to your truck scale, the customer now has an option to use scheduled preventative maintenance to extend their warranty. This is great since these days some bid specifications call for a 5-year comprehensive warranty and this option fulfills that requirement.

This ‘blue blanket’ includes all weighbridge components and indicator plus travel and labor at standard rates. The part number for the blue blanket warranty is AWT97-501690.

The foundation of success

This month we continue to look at the overall service and maintenance of a truck scale.  Today we look at the weighbridge and the foundation. Even the toughest scale on earth is put at risk on a poor foundation. Cracked foundations can lead to movement or settling which causes chronic calibration errors. Letting little cracks become big cracks may require removing part or all of the scale foundation and pouring a new one for the scale to once again weigh accurately.

scale foundation

It is important that the end user periodically walk around their scale and do a thorough visual check of the foundation and let your service tech know of any issue that you see possibly developing. Take a look at the weighbridge or deck. Rust or crumbling concrete can weaken the scale structure and cause problems. Clean and paint rusted steel decks. Continue reading

Heavy Capacity Preventative Maintenance Schedule

It is probably a good idea to have your heavy capacity truck scales checked at least every six months at a minimum. Also, a convenient time to conduct a preventative maintenance scale inspection is during the regularly scheduled calibration check.  It’s a good idea to inspect your truck scale just prior to peak usage times, such as harvest season in agricultural operations. Click here for more detailed scale service info available from Central Carolina Scale.