Modifying equipment is the no no. If anyone told him that he'd be fired for doing anything to a truck, they lied. They have a clear list of driver repairs.
As far as PM's, we put PM report cards in the trucks and belive it or not, we get very few negative comments. I cannot speak for other shops, but me personally have only gotten 1 bad PM report card back in 7 years and that was for leaving a greasy handprint on the bumper. OK, my bad. Many of the other negative comments were about a front-end shimmy that we could not fix, it was a Sterling issue that took them 2 years to coem up with a fix that we are just starting to do now. I understand that a truck comes in with a shimmy problem and goes right back out with the same problem, we're the jerks that couldn't fix it.
Most driver don't care to know that we've been fighting with Sterling for a fix for many years on many problems. Right now there about 40 open issues with Sterling now. Font-end shimmy, dashes cracking & falling apart, A/C problems, premature clucth failures, seat side panels breaking, just to name a few.
A driver writes all these things up, the few fixes that they do let us do always ahve a parts shortage. Do we hold a truck becasue the seat side panel is cracked because they are back ordered for a week? No, we let it run and get complaints that the drivers concerns were not addressed. Sorry, I woudl ahve replaced it if we had it. Sterlings are not quaility trucks.
My best suggestion would be to be totally honest and calm when filling out a PM report card and send it to the director of maintenence like it says to do, they follow up on all report cards, good or bad. They don't put much faith is irrate letters though. Tell the facts and ask for a follow up. We need a solution. As drivers,tell us what can we do better so we can all get along? You'd be supprised if you actaully talked to the mechanics how many of them will glad to explain why or why not something was done or not done.
I know that we are really talked bad about when we take off an extra antenna, or when we took the ashtrays out, but we were to do so. They also hate when we move the radio box, but we have remove the passenger seat to get the engine cover off, it unavoidable to touch your radios sometimes.
We could go on forever about what problems we have, DSR vs. mechanics. But who's got the solution? Are there any questions that we can get some honest feed back about and maybe make something better?
concerning your pm report cards...i have been driving conway linehaul for 9 years...but because i do not run the FAC for maintenance for us (XNW), i do not see a report card...in fact i have seen one and it was just last year because the import dsr that takes them to the shop left in the truck in the sunvisor (top side) one day coming back late and seeing the sun rise on i95 north in CT, i flipped the visor down and saw it...it was about 2 months old but, now i can say i saw one...