Did something dumb today.

[doc henderson]

K-guy, you must not be doing it right!  

Nebraska, my bother came up one time, and I was building my shop in Hays, Ks.  I had not finished the soffits and we had a pigeon problem.  he was shooting my pump-up bb gun with a scope and taking them out one by one.  then he wanted to shoot my Styer 270.  one pull and I said, "let's go do stiches at the office".  The scope hit his face, but it had not had time to start bleeding yet.

[SawyerTed]

Thankfully no stitches needed for me.  But it still hurts.   :D

[barbender]

It sure is hard to shoot good after getting a scope or whatever to the face😬

[SawyerTed]

Decided to go fishing so I can heal! :D

[Southside]

You sure got some tough pigeons there in Hays Doc.   :D

[JD Guy]

It sure is hard to shoot good after getting a scope or whatever to the face😬

Around here it's commonly referred to as "Scope Bite" and easily recognized on the recipient 

[firefighter ontheside]

I'm ashamed of this, but I got very lucky and nothing came of it.  I hooked up my trailer this morning to go pick up some metal for a carport I'm building.  I remember it making a clunk when it "dropped" down over the ball.  I closed the latch and put the lock back in, hooked up chains and electric and I was off.  The amazing thing is that I drove over 100 miles without an issue.  I got home with my stuff and as I was unloading my stuff I looked over at the hitch and saw that the tongue had not dropped down and was just sitting on top of the ball.  I can't believe I was so lucky that it did not fall off.  Did I say I drove over 100 miles.  The good news would have been that my chains were on and on correctly so the trailer wouldn't have gotten away, but something would surely have been damaged.  I consider myself a pretty good and responsible trailer user, but that was just plain dumb.  The lesson for me is don't trust the clunk and get down there and see that it's seated right.

[doc henderson]

I bet 5 bucks, it will never happen to you again!  must a had some tongue weight!      not being careful and getting lucky is how we learn!   :P       :D

[red]

A friend of mine did the same exact thing with his race car trailer with the race car on the trailer !  

[Wlmedley]

Don't do what I did a couple years ago.Hooked my trailer up and hitch didn't want to go down on the ball.Being I almost always wore heavy work boots at the time I (without realizing I had light shoes on) decided to stomp the hitch down with my foot.I had a slight limp for a couple weeks being my foot was swollen up.

[Resonator]

I've heard if you try moving a trailer by lifting it with the tip of your pallet forks, and miss high with the forks and hit the hitch coupler, you will have to replace the coupler.

Reminds me of when I drove truck, we were always warned about "dropping a trailer". This usually happened in below zero weather when someone would back under a trailer, and assume the fifth wheel was latched (when in fact it was stuck open with frozen grease). They would then pull out and not make it very far, before the trailer would slide off the fifth wheel and nosedive.

[Old Greenhorn]

Don't feel dumb Bill, just feel lucky. :D ;D
 If it makes you feel any better, we had a bad wildland fire a number of years back which had them calling for volunteers from every department in 3 counties to muster the next day for the fireline. It went on for over a week. My guys went down on a day I could not get away, and I went down the next day, but I was alone. I drove over to the firehouse in the wee hours and hitched up the 6 wheeler on the trailer (that's what they needed for moving gear and hose lines). I drove south about 20 minutes but something felt 'off' with the trailer so I pulled over and found that I had never latched the hitch. It was just sitting on the ball with the cam lever opened. Now if it was my trailer I would have been mad at myself, but it was the departments and I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I was 'the guy' that taught everyone about responding with the 6 wheeler, hooking it up, checking all connections twice, as well as all the driver training for it. 6am on the shoulder of a lonely road and I am looking over my shoulder to see if anybody is watching me latch the hitch. ;D How would I explain THAT one to the Chief?

[sawguy21]

Oh, I have NEVER done anything like that! Nope not ever!

[rusticretreater]

Man, life wouldn't be so hard if we didn't have being human to deal with!

[Nebraska]

The Iast time I did something like that, I was hauling hay. I stopped to weigh at the fertilizer plant next door to the clinic. I notice the trailer tongue looked taller than it should've. Thankfully it was Sunday afternoon  and no one was around and I was empty  at the time....
So my turn, has any one ever switched material thicknesses while assembling a project and wondered why you can't pick it up???.....then realized the screws you were using previously are now firmly  holding it down to the saw horse. :

[Machinebuilder]

it's been quite a while for me...........with a trailer

I had to borrow a trailer to go about 100mi to get somthing.

I failed to realize the trailer had a 2 5/16" coupler and I had a 2" ball.

the trailer popped up off the ball as i was pulling into the persons driveway.

I remembered to do some country repair with an old rag over the ball and then put the trailer on.

it got me home but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

[doc henderson]

with attention to tongue weight (how the trailer is built and loaded) you can get away with this often, but not always.      Luck, divine intervention, physics or all the above.  There but for the grace of God, go I. smiley_swinging_board smiley_brick hits_hardhat smiley_carpenter_hit_thumb

[firefighter ontheside]

Thanks guys, you make me feel better about doing dumb stuff with my trailer.  Yes Doc, tongue weight is definitely what saved me.  My trailer has pretty good tongue weight when empty and as it was loaded appropriately, it had good tongue weight even with stuff on it.  

[Magicman]

 

 
And this is all that I am going to say about that !!! 

[barbender]

 I had hauled my dump trailer out to a job last winter to haul some logs home. Well, I spent a longer day in the processor than I intended to, so I didn't feel like loading the trailer that night. So I figured I'd just leave the trailer in the woods. I unmatched it, unhooked everything and ran the jack down. Got in my truck and drove home.

 Next morning, one of the forwarder operators called wondering what was going on, why my trailer was in the middle of the road? Well once I got to the job, and moved my trailer that was right in the middle of the haul road🤦 

 I figured out that when I jacked it up, I must not have jacked it quite high enough to clear the pintle hook. So when I took of driving, I was pulling the trailer behind me, with the jack foot sliding along on the frozen road. Then when I finally hit a hole or something, thr trailer got free from the pintle and stayed behind🤦🤦 At least most of my mistakes happen a long ways from civilization🤷

 You'll notuce I mentioned pintle hooks, I finally switched all of my heavy trailers over to pintle rings because I always manage to destroy ball hitches when moving them with skid steer forks.

[jpassardi]

Lynn,
Good thinking parking the mill out of the road in the gutter...  ;)

[doc henderson]

I have a crane that goes on my track loader.  My goose neck tongue with the 10-foot crane is about all I can lift.  I like using the track loader and crane, as I can swing this way and that, and easily park and jackknife, any trailer.  so, I had a stump left and moved it to the back of the trailer behind the wheels to take some weight off.  well, I could not get the ball to go in, and each time I bumped it, the trailer rolled and slid on the landing gear down the slight grade on my drive.  It was near perfectly balanced with no wight on the tongue.  It achieved my goal and more!

 

 

 

[Stephen1]

My turn, I didn't want to disconnect the trailer at the shop. I was taking the chainsaw and meeting the tow truck to pick up some maple logs for a customer. we could only get 2 logs on, so we decided to go drop them at the shop 2 mins away. I parked on the road next to a new Audi 3. Went in and unloaded the logs from the flat bed. Jumped back in my truck and drove off to get the final log.... the trailer is 24' with my 2 drop down WM legs welded on the sides at the back so I can load my bobcat. Well as I pulled ahead, I wheeled into the parking lot across the street to make a quick turn around, the pin caught the front of the Audi and tore the front nose cone off. my guess...3-5K by the time that is repaired. The  lady owner was a little *pithed but very thankful that I came into her shop to tell what I had done. 

[barbender]

 I wish you guys would stop, this is turning into a tell-all. I don't have enough time to tell all😂

 When I worked for a paving company, I drove a Ford 2 to  with a tilt bed utility trailer. The thing with tilt beds, especially a deck over like this one, is the axles are set far forward, and you have a lit of the trailer "tail" hanging back past that pivot point. 

 Well, one time I ended up on the wrong street trying to find an address (way before Google Maps), it ended up being a dead end with a small cul-de-sac on the end. Without any other options, I made the loop on that cul-de-sac- and wiped out every mail box with the back of that trailer🤦

[aigheadish]

I don't have a lot of experience with trailers and I'm not sure this is dumb as much as a learning experience...

I remember when I was probably 15 or 16 years old and worked in a big park. One of my jobs was leaf collection with a tractor of some small variety, pulling a leaf collector box thing that was probably about 8 feet long by 5 feet wide or so. Well, I could connect the leaf collector and pull it out of a relatively full barn without issue. I went about my day, collecting leaves, dumping them, and repeating that process. Finally, it was quitting time, so I went back to the barn and proceeded to spend the next two hours attempting to back the collector into it's spot. The amount of backing up, saying "nope," pulling forward, backing up again, saying "nope" (which eventually turned into many other four letter words), I did is still maddening to this day. Someone, somewhere said that backing up short trailers was much more difficult than long trailers. I know I was very frustrated. I hadn't thought about it until just this second, like 30 years later, but I'm sure the leaf collector was light enough for me to take it off the hitch to lift and push it into it's spot by hand.