Landing gear

With all due respect that is too high. The greasy bottom of the trailer, after dropping needs to be higher than the tractor drive tires, but lower than the 5th wheel (flat position). Every driver that comes to our account, where we drop LOTS of trailers says the same thing as you mentioned, they just have wildly varying ideas of the gap between landing gear foot and ground. And not only are they trying to achieve different distance between landing gear foot & ground they call that distance EVERYTHING between "half-inch & couple inches" even if they in reality leave the foot 0.0000000001 milimeters to negative 6 inches (trailer far above 5th wheel).

What we settled on to make the point clear and remove everybody's technique is:
(for level-ground only)
1. Crank the landing gear to the ground, first contact with ground.
2 RAISE the landing gear by cranking the handle UP 6 turns in the high-gear postion (most movement for each turn of handle).
3. Lower your air bags or SLOWLY pull away and let trailer settle to ground.
4. NEVER EVER leave landing gear handle sticking out to the side, as being left in the cranking position.

OTR drivers drop a trailer and leave. If they aren't chased down and told they are leaving them trailers too high, they call that "doing it just right."

If you do it the way described above, the tractor picks up all the weight of the trailer and you can raise the landing gear just using one finger. We've had several drivers receive broken arms, fingers, cracked ribs from dealing with TOO HIGH landing gear. The handle can snap back and injure a driver.

 

All the best intentions fly out the window if the yard is full of potholes and mounds, especially dirt yards. The perfect drop gets yard dogged to the dock and then again to a completely different spot. I may have dropped the trailer perfectly on level ground, but it ends up in a sinkhole or high humped on Mt. Everest. No matter what you need to be able to deal with high or low trailers.

4x4's work well. Newbies, learn that the crank has 2 gears. It's easier to raise in low gear.

 

I've pulled specialized water trailers for fracking that have an electric middle landing gear to assist raising and lowering the three axle trailers. It ran off a single 12v battery. It was great...

... when it worked.

 

As a yard dog, driver, whatever I am always helping drivers with this. You can ask I dont mind. Ill back underneath lift off the ground. Let them adjust the landing gear accrodingly then drop it and let them back underneath. Gets them out of the way quicker and says them a call to company telling them cant adjust landing gear.

 

Is landing gear such a problem?
There are two gear ratios for when it gets hard.
That lower gear may take many more turns per quarter inch, but it is usually an easy turning.

I'm 60 years old and I've never even thought that I needed an air assist for the landing gear.

Sure, there was that one time.
A 45k beer load, and the trailer was so low that I could not get under it.
Even at low gear I could not crank it up, so I hailed a yard dog to get under it.
But that was one time in over 5 years of driving.

 

6 turns in high gear sounds a bit much but I guess it all depends on the gear ratios inside the gear box of you trailer's landing gear. Where I work 2 turns after you snug the landing gear to the ground is enough that all our trucks can get under them fine and have no problem raising the gear.

 

One trick I use when the trailer is just a little high, maybe a small gap between trailer bottom and top of 5th wheel, is to hook up all lines aand then charge the trailer suppply line by pushing inn the red brake valve on the dash. On air-ride trailers this will start to fill the trailer airbags, which MAY cause the trailer rear to rise and the front to lower as trailer becomes more level. SOMETIMES this is enough to change the handle from being impossible to crank into just 1 or 2 turns hard and then easy. Just make sure the trailer is grabbed by the 5th wheel jaws and tractor brakes are set,

This is an issue WITH EVER NEW DRIVER WE HIRE on this account. It doesn't matter if they are newbies pulling their first trailer or former O-O with 15 years OTR.

 

EVERY one of our "new" drivers (rookie or very experienced) the second thing they say, after saying I know better than to drop too high, is "I think maybe the yard dog/switcher driver might be cranking the gear too high for some reason. If anyone has worked more than a day as a switcher driver they would know the last thing they want is climbing those stairs one extra time. I'm always careful to witness the driver doing it the wrong way one or more times before I speak to him. I also and very careful to say "I know you already know this", and "I know you aren't the problem but one of the OTHER new guys is dropping trailers high by doing X" and then giving him the quick "all the way down, then back up 6 turns". I'll even do it for them while they watch what I mean. Works every time.