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Show CHECKING UPON TRUCKS PERFORMANCE REQUIRES CARE face of the disc, indicating stops by black dashes, varying in length as the stops vary and showing the minute and hour when tho truck was standing. In this way the driver can be hekl to account for every movement of the vehicle ve-hicle in his charge, from the time he leaves the garage until he returns tu it at night. Another typo of recording instrument instru-ment embodies a sort of pendulum with a pencil at the end. The pendulum is so placed that when the truck is in motion the vibration causes it to make an irregular line on a record sheet. When the truck is not moving the line ceases. This device is extremely simple, sim-ple, almost foolproof and serves its purpose pur-pose very effectively. .All told, there are about ten or twelve of these recording devices on the market. The basic idea 'is the same in all, to giv,3 a complete record of the truck movements during its working work-ing hours. With one of the devices on the truck the owner has practically a watchman on the vehicle all the time. In addition to the recording equipment equip-ment on the truck it is desirable to have a record sheet of some sort in the garage to which may be transferred all the records from tho disc orl sheet in the instruments. The record sheet will embody the timo of start in the morning, morn-ing, tho stops, duration and reason for each, any work performed on the truck 1)3' tho driver, the amount of fuel taken ta-ken on, the mileake and route traversed. trav-ersed. Obviously different operators will have different data which llrey will want embodied on the shcot, but the basic principle is always the same: A complete record of truck movements. move-ments. Without this it is hard to see' how any operator can expect maximum efficiency. TO SAVE TIME CHIEF OBJECT OF onions Motor-driven Vehicle Can Do Quadruple Work Compared Com-pared to Speed of Horse. Securing Positive Records of Accomplishment Brings Out Some Clever Devices. In the final analysis, the superiority .of motor truck transportation over other types is its greater speed. Take a motor truck and a horse-drawn vehicle of precisely tho same capacity, place them in operation under precisely sim-ilar sim-ilar conditions and tho motor truck will jdo several times tho amount of work accomplished by its rival; if conditions are specially devised for the motor vehicle's ve-hicle's convenience it will turn in four times as much work as the horse-drawn truck. However, the principal thing to bear in mind at tho moment is that tho motor truck 's superiority lies in its speed. Now, granting this, it is almost a (ruism that delays of any wind with the motor truck are more costly proportionately pro-portionately than with tho horse-drawn vehicle. If the user is to reap the full benefit of tine motor truck 's greatest great-est asset every species of delay must be eliminated or at least be cut down to the unavoidable minimum. Delays on the road in motor truck operation fall readily into several classes, some duo to mechanical failures, fail-ures, some to operating mistakes, some to road conditions. By taking due thought the truck owner can eliminate practically all of these, and in the fight to accomplish this end the fallible falli-ble human factor, as represented by the driver, must always be borne in mind. Tho motor truck, from its very nature, na-ture, must be out from under tho supervision super-vision of the owner during a considerable consid-erable part of the day. Tho driver of the truck is, so to speak, "on his own" most of the. time. Many drivers driv-ers are conscientious and plug along consistently, turning in an honest day's work at night. Other drivers aro dis tinctly dishonest and manago to spend a good part of their time in ice cream parlors and similar institutions. Many a motor truck transportation system has failed to make good simply because be-cause the drivers out from under supervision su-pervision wasted so much of their working timo that tho efficiency of the trucks was cut down below a paying pay-ing basis. The only way in which this condition condi-tion can be remedied and the movements move-ments of drivers be made a matter of positive record instead of dubious surmise is by the uso of recording devices, de-vices, of which there are a number 01 excellent types on the market, with improvements im-provements teing made all tho time. By the use of modern equipment of this kind the truck owner can have placed in his hands every night a complete com-plete record of the vehicle's movements move-ments during every moment of the day. Well worth fvhile, yon will say, and indeed it is. We shall describe the various equipment available for this purpose. , Speedometer Uncertain. Many truck operators check up their drivers by means of speedometer read-, ings, which are taken in the morning before the vehicles go out and at night after they return to the garage. This serves well enough if the instrument used is intended for truck operation. An ordinary speedometer is so delicately delicate-ly constructed that the excessive vibration vi-bration existing in a truck very soon puts it out of order. Again, .the speedometer speed-ometer drivo must be sealed so that the driver cannot tamper with it, as it is a simple matter for a skillful mechanic me-chanic to disconnect the drive and claim that it has shaken loose in operation. opera-tion. It is better to have the speedometer speedom-eter drive connected with a moving part of the transmission than with the wheel in the ordinary way. In truck fleets where th.e bonus system is used it is important, in .iustice to tho drivers, driv-ers, that there shall be no failure of the speedometer. In this connection a useful addition to the recording equipment of the truck is the odometer, which keeps a record of mileage only, paying no attention at-tention to speed. This little instrument instru-ment is usually placed in the hub cap, and one of its great advantages is that it can be locked in place, making tampering tam-pering practically impossible. But neither speedometer nor odometer odom-eter quite meets all the conditions of this particular case. Something more is needed to supply the necessary check on motor truck drivers, and, as is 'always inevitable, the manufacturers have supplied it. One of the popular types of recording record-ing devices is fitted with paper disks lined off clockwise. The instrument has a clock movement and also a marking mark-ing device which travels around the |
