Archive for January, 2009

An old gasoline pump caught Mark Reiff’s eye while he browsed at a neighbor’s garage sale. He paid $75 for the vintage Wayne, not knowing how he’d use the red and yellow beauty. A few months after the purchase, the professional landscaper gazed out his front window, across his suburban front yard, and something about that pump clicked. “I can put a gas station out front,” he thought. Crazy? Maybe. Fun? Definitely. That was eight years, many miles and 35,000 v…

Any trucker knows that sitting on a stuffed wallet for long periods of time is pretty uncomfortable. Since there seems to be a plastic card that goes with just about everything these days, not to mention stacks of receipts, it doesn’t take long before a wallet is pushing past maximum capacity. For Kiril Alexandrov, founder and president of Big Skinny, that constant discomfort inspired him. “Every Christmas I would get a couple of wallets and some of them look thin when they are empty…

There have been a lot of changes in the trucking industry over the past six decades, but not many drivers got to see all of them firsthand. Hap Ghan, 81, who first got behind the wheel of a big rig when he was 17, has seen them all. “I never thought I’d see cruise control or stuff like that,” he says. “The younger bucks that drive them today have no idea what we went through when we started, compared to what we drive today.”Some of those young bucks include two so…

Studies show that more than 70 percent of the 3.2 million professional drivers in the U.S. have one or more serious health problems such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Being on the road and having irregular hours doesn’t help. Drivers tend to let small conditions progress to bigger problems, simply because of cost or time. Minor illnesses become extreme, and can lead to hospitalization and disability. The drivers then may lose their commercial license and become unable to work, w…

The world is changing, and so is the technology used to handle a variety of natural and manmade disasters. While it might not be pleasant to think about a national disaster striking, being prepared for such an event is becoming a fact of life. Which is why TruckVault Products has developed Hazmat Emergency Response Center (H.E.R.C.), an emergency response trailer designed to treat victims of radiation or chemical exposure, fire or other wide-scale traumas. “No one in the country has addre…