Steel, Coil and Pipe Freight That Rides Legal on Every Scale

A single coil is often already a truckload. Once one piece runs into the tens of thousands of pounds, the deck weighs out with one or two coils on it, so a load that looks half empty is a full truck by law. What we need to price and plan it is the coil weight, the outside and inside diameter, the width, the eye orientation you want it loaded in, and whether it has to be tarped.

It changes everything. Metal coils get their own section of the federal securement rules once the coil or the group weighs 5,000 pounds or more, and the required arrangement depends on whether the eye is lengthwise, crosswise or vertical. Eyes lengthwise take tiedowns through the eye arranged to restrain forward and rearward movement, with blocking where the rule calls for it. Eyes vertical take tiedowns criss-crossed through the eye plus a tiedown over the top. In every orientation the coil sits in a rack, a purpose built cradle or timbers and chocks positioned so rolling is not physically possible, and the driver inspects and re-tensions inside the first fifty miles once the load beds into the dunnage. Tell us the orientation at booking, because a truck rigged for eyes crosswise is not automatically rigged for eyes vertical.

Yes, and it matters because water damage on steel is permanent, not cosmetic. Moisture that reaches between the wraps of a coil stains inward, galvanized picks up wet storage stain when moisture sits against zinc with no airflow, and a receiver buying material for an exposed or coated application downgrades or rejects it rather than reworking it. Tell us at booking that the load tarps, and steel tarps and the time to install them are part of the assignment instead of an argument at the mill gate.

Short overhang past the deck is legal in most states with the projection flagged and marked, and there is a limit to how far that goes. Beyond it the joint moves on a stretch or extendable trailer under permit, with the route checked ahead of the truck for turns, bridges and restrictions. Send us the actual joint length, the outside diameter, the joint count and the weight, and the answer comes back as a specific trailer and permit plan for those states, not a maybe.

Yes, but the unloading method is decided before dispatch, not at the gate. A jobsite delivery means confirming what lifting equipment is on site and who operates it, whether the ground supports a truck with a loaded deck, whether the site can take a fifty three foot trailer at all, and what the delivery window is against the crew's schedule. Bundles of rebar and mesh also need to come off in the order the crew places them, so load sequence is planned in reverse from the unload.

More than most freight. The bill of lading carries piece counts and piece weights, heat numbers and mill test reports stay attached to the material so the product keeps its traceability, scrap moves against a certified scale ticket at both ends, and imported steel carries the country of melt and pour into its entry paperwork. Metal that loses its identification does not lose its value on the road, it loses it at the receiver, where a bundle nobody can trace to a heat cannot be used on a certified job.

Yes, and it is home territory. Northeastern Mexico is a steel and pipe corridor and the South Texas crossings are weekly business here, including the customs brokers, the maneuvering yards and the carriers on the Mexican side. The two things that decide a metals crossing are the paperwork staying with the material and the weight plan working on both sides of the line, because axle and gross rules are not identical, so the load is built for the leg that is strictest rather than restacked at the border.

The citation lands on the driver and the carrier, which is exactly why the prevention is upstream of both. Weight distribution is planned from the piece list before the crane picks the first coil, positions are assigned rather than left to the loader, and the trailer tandems are set for the route including states with their own kingpin to rear axle limits. Give us weight per piece instead of total tonnage and this is a non-event. Without piece weights nobody can build a legal load plan, they can only hope.

Both, and they run differently. Scrap is a weight and ticket business: prepared grades load to a target weight, the load is weighed on a certified scale at both ends, and the buyer's ticket is what settles the transaction, so the scale your receiver accepts gets confirmed before the truck rolls. Copper and aluminum are a security question instead, because they resell by weight with no serial number to trace. Those loads get a recorded seal, no unsecured stop in the first hours out of the shipper, and cargo coverage limits reviewed against the value sitting on the deck.