My Promised Update About American Furniture Warehouse

CONGRATS PIANOMAN! You will do incredible I believe in you! Pianoman, do they have navigational units and isn't a little harder to maintain your dispatch and keep your dispatchers up to speed. Like I.E. when you were delayed a couple time in your article? Also do you find that it is safer traveling out west without such a low governed speed? I am a former Swifty from unfortunately circumstances but I agree with you 100% they are a FANTASTIC company to jump into the world of trucking with.

Thanks G and Big Scott! It's a total cakewalk since we just have two loads the whole week--the one going out and the furniture backhaul.

Victor, I'm sorry to hear things didn't work out for you at Swift but I do hope you are able to continue in the industry and find a way to make it work for you. I will always be grateful to Swift for the opportunity they gave me to get started in this industry and I really enjoyed my time there. I knew alot of drivers on my dedicated account who had been there for many years, so don't think for a second Swift is just for beginners.

To answer your question about the governed speed, I don't really have a straight answer one way or another and I'm not sure I want to open that can of worms in this thread. For the most part, it's not so much the specific speed you go that determines how safe your driving is, but it's more about your following distance, alertness, attention to road signs/conditions and weather conditions, and giving yourself adequate time to react to various situations.

On that last point about adequate time to react, what I'm talking about is making smart choices regardless of what your governed speed or the speed limit is. For example, if you approach an intersection with a green light in a 45 mph zone and your lane is clear but the next lane over has stopped vehicles, it's not wise to go 45 even though it's legal and your truck will go that fast. Someone may cut into your lane at 5 mph and you will have to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. Same for curves--there may be no suggested speed for the curve, but it's always smart to slow down just in case there's something around that curve you're not aware of. As long as the speed limit is 75 and I can see ahead for miles and my way is clear, I don't see anything wrong with going that fast and I like it because I can get through boring Kansas quicker. But I become a hazard if I stop making smart choices to adjust my speed to the circumstances.

Oh yeah, we use Qualcomms but the navigation function is disabled on ours. My truck has the MCP50, which is alot smaller and "weaker" than the MCP200 I had at Swift. They disabled the navigation because it slowed down the unit too much.

No issues keeping dispatch up to date. They give us our packet with all our stops at the beginning of the week, and they don't want to be involved with our day to day operations unless we have an issue. In a situation like last week when we were delayed, we just called dispatch to let them know what was going on, but it wasn't an issue since the freight belongs to us anyways--we just get it back to the store as soon as safely possible.

Here are some pictures of my truck and the trailers we haul!

I brought my bike along with me and store it in the top bunk, so I also took a few pictures of that so others can see how it fits and how I secured it. But...they're not uploading for some reason so I'll post them in another reply.

Here's the truck pic that didn't post before:

And here are the bike pictures:

And here's one of the sleeper panel with No Idle AC and heat with the built-in inverter:

Nice! Like the trailer graphics.

You could go moose hunting with that massive bull bar and not skip a beat!

Nice! Like the trailer graphics.

You could go moose hunting with that massive bull bar and not skip a beat!

I'm pretty sure it is only rated for Elk and below. Maybe a black bear as well, but moose and kodiaks are out of the question, lol

Yeah I'm literally driving a billboard ad around, so I gotta be extra courteous out here haha.

I'm pretty sure we got the super deluxe plus version of the cattleguard haha. I have yet to see any trucks out here with bigger cattleguards. Apparently we didn't use to have any and then we had like a dozen or so deer strikes with a month or two (don't know if that number is accurate, heard it from another driver), so management decided the deer wouldn't get the last laugh.