Truck Driving Jobs

cdreid · Joined: 21 Jul 2005 Posts: 227

The problem with pete 387's and some other t rucks is of course that the guys who design them have apparently never driven a truck.. or even learned anything from car designers. The dash may look nifty or something but because of its curves/angles its unuseable for a lot of things.

So my quick and dirty desk for these is much different. It doesnt mount to the dash at all as it would require you to cover the dash in a few square feet of velcro. Thus there are 4 solutions available. One is the old standby of heavy duty copper/aluminum tubing bolted to the floor. As most of us cant/wont drill through the floor of a $100,000 truck thats out. Another is what some commercial providers do and bolt it to the seat. That can be ok but there are problems. You have to bolt it to the bottom/floor and that can not only bend the seat it's incredibly weak. You could bolt it to both seats but you can guarantee you're goint to toss it out the window that morning at 3am headed to the bunk you trip over it and eat matress. In addition you have to step over/around the clusterhump on the right side of your seat now.

So my solutions are these: first i used a contraption cosntructed of 1.5" pvc bolted to a hajer fridge in the floor between the seats (MAN i miss all that room!). That actually didnt work well as over time no matter how you connect it, it breaks loose. Very bad on a curvy bumpy mountain road when you have this giant clusterhump sitting on your gearshift. The second is to attach it to the passenger seat.

To do this you simply make an almost square out of 1.5" pvc pipe. The 4th and LONG piece of pvc isnt actually connected to the first. You take a piece of 1/4" or less plywood and screw it to the squarish contraption. That wil lsit on your seat and be bungeed on. Bungee it firmly including between the back of the seat and t he seat. you now have a pipe aimed out at you. You'll need to adjust the pvc on the plywood once you have it all set up. I find it best to aim the long piece towards the dash to the right of the gearshift a fair distance (6" maybe). Now attach a pvc 90 aiming up. Place a short piece in here. Use pvc glue on Everything and a small screw in each joint is good as well, but not til you have the whole thing cut and built. Now at the top of that attach another 90 aiming left across and in front of the dash over the gearshift. It should be maybe 4" from the dash. The idea is that it should be exactly under the center of your laptop. Use cheap shelf supports, the smallest available, at the joints to provide strength. At the 90 attach a couple of those to support the plywood. Another idea that works well is instead of using a 90 between the horizontal bar and the vertical bar you will attach the desktop and last horizontal bar to is to use a 3way connector and run pipe to the floor. This provides much more stability but you'll transmit every vibration and bump the truck hits to the laptop. And we hit some BIG bumps.

Its hard to describe this but more is better and strength is the key. Its good to use small cell spray pvc foam in this as well especially where the pvc sits on top of the horizontal plywood. If you fill the pvc with this it should also get rid of any squeaks. Once you have it all constructed the way you want put it all together using pvc glue.

This will move a TINY amount but thats good as it shelters your laptop from vibration and bumps. If you want it more solid get a piece of ultrathin steel wire or whatever and attach it between your cb mount and the plywood desktop. This sounds convoluted but while being intrusive this worked very well for me for several years. You wont trip over it as you go out, it doesnt really block much other than making it slightly harder to pull the breaks and making it harder to access the passenger side. But i rarely ever went there anyway. You can disattach the whole thing in moments by removing the wire and the bungees. You could also take a strip of velcro or something and attach it to the dash as well but i never fuond that necessary.

One other solution i nevr got around too as my company switched out our trucks far too often. You could attach a bar in back floor to ceiling somehow on the edge of the cabinets and then make a bar that comes forward beside the passenger seat at knee level and go from there.

The idea here is really to rig it yourself. 1.5" pvc is very very strong . It is only weak at the joints adn those you can brace up using screwed on small shelf brackets.

Hope this helps and that it isnt incomprehensible.

cdreid · Joined: 21 Jul 2005 Posts: 227

If you dont care about having one you can look at without taking your eyes off of check out Vassago's solution on the freightliner desktop forum. I lime mine in front of me so i can use gps if i want but his is nifty in its simplicity.

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