When The Small Stuff Is The Crucial Stuff
Keeping a commercial vehicle running well and in good physical shape is essential to keeping your trucking business running smoothly as well. You know you have to keep inspecting brakes, horns, lights, engine parts, and other parts of the truck, but sometimes the smaller items, like chips and dents, really hold the kyp to long-term use of the truck. Ignore these small items, and you could find they create enough of a problem to eventually require more serious repair.
Fix Glass Chips While They're Still Cheap
If you get a windshield chip while on the road, try to get it patched before you take off again. Small chips in the windshield are a fact of life for many truck drivers, and it's easy to let a small chip slide because you just don't have time to take the truck in. But the continued pressure on the windshield and vibrations from bumps in the road can make the chip suddenly get a lot larger, especially if the chip is near the edges of the windshield. Suddenly what might have been a quick patching job becomes a widnshield replacement job.
Another problem is that dust can get into the chip. In order to patch the chip correctly, it has to be clean and dry, and dust stuck in the chip (it can get stuck so deeply that it can't be cleaned out) makes it difficult for the patching material to harden and stay in place. That means that you might think you've gotten the chip patched after it's been there for a while, but then the patch could fail.
Prevent Paint Chips From Rusting Over
Just as debris can chip your windshield, it can chip your paint, too. Paint chips might not suddenly expand into giant cracks instantaneously, but the paint around the chip can gradually flake off. The exposed metal underneath can rust over, and if that rust is left alone, it can grow and cause the metal to deteriorate. Along with getting windshield chips fixed, if you see paint chips, get those patched before you have any rust getting into the mix.
Don't Assume Small Dents Are Nothing
If you've also ended up with small dents in the metal of your truck, paint chips or not, you've got to check those out carefully. A small dent that doesn't have a chip in the middle of it might not look serious, but take a look at the surrounding parts of the truck. If the dent is near a seam or an edge, get the dent fixed and the seam or edge inspected. The dent, as small as it was, could have weakened a connecting point between two different pieces of metal, much as a small dent long a seam in a can is able to cause a breach in the metal of the can.
Commercial vehicle repair places like Florida TRUCK & Trailer CO can fix these issues quickly when they're still small. It's understandable if you want to wait until you've delivered your truck's contents to get everything fixed, but don't wait too long, unless you want to find that the small incident you noticed has suddenly grown overnight.
