It’s that time again. Test tomorrow. I went for another four hours training today; I spent two hours practising my reverse, still only about 60/40, maybe 70/30. I got it in a quite a few times without him having to stop me, but I also had to have him stop me twice or three times, and had to take three shunts on one go. If you consider all the times he had to stop and correct me, the once I had to stop and start from scratch, and the three shunt fail, it’s probably more like 50/50. I have an hour tomorrow to try again before driving to the test centre. The other two hours were spent with me driving around without any real need for instruction. I brushed one kerb (not a fail) then pulling into the last street (the one which my training placed is based on!) mounted the pavement (fail). Bugger. Still, unless they actually take me to that street I think I should be alright on the road. The first few minutes were a bit hairy; it’s a massively tight turn onto the street from the yard and some clown had parked a van just where you have to drive the cab to make the turn, which was focusing. Then I fumbled a gear change but after that I was chatting away whilst doing the business. I was a lot nervous again. I was all buoyed up after my fail, knowing that I had it in me to pass on the road, but three weeks off and it had grown into a big scary monster again. Two minutes in the cab and I was a happy bunny again. Well, two minutes on the road anyway, pissed off with myself in the yard trying to suss that reverse out. It’s a bigger course tomorrow, if I keep my head and make tiny corrections I think I could do it. Not will, but could. That is another issue I have with my reversing, I want to swing the trailer around, so I put loads of turn on the unit, get it in the right position and straighten up to come straight back, but because I had so much turn on by the time I’ve got the cab back behind the trailer, the trailer has carried on turning and gone too far. I really have not got my head around it. It will be the luck of the draw tomorrow. I could do it, but I only get one go at it (well, you could consider it three goes as I get two shunts, but it’s been taking me those and more in practise). If I understood what I was doing and how to do it I would be laughing. As it is I just keep steering one way and then another, then give up and take a shunt, and hope for the best. Still, I feel reassured about my driving ability on the road part of the test. […]
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Spring’s here!
Wow, what a lovely morning. I’m on 2-10 this week so I can’t enjoy the whole day, but I had two hours in the garden this morning and it was lovely. I’ve planted two lots of gladioli, calabrese (standard and quick heading), parsley and rocket. Yesterday I moved all the wallflowers from their overwintering positions into flowering sites, planted out red onion seeds, parsnips and cauliflower. We have daffodils flowering, snowdrops, hyacinth, crocuses and the remains of the cyclamen and hellibores. The forsythia is coming into bloom, the willow is putting out catkins and the fruit trees are all bursting forth. As is acer ‘orange dream’, which is only a baby (new last year) and it’s well outstripping the three year established acer ‘inabe shidare’. The garden is bursting into life, drying out, and starting to look like something other than a mud pit. Spiffing. If the weather holds until Friday I’m going to have a whale of a time in the garden. It’s my long weekend off, and Wendy will be at CAB, so it’s a full day in the garden dicking about for the Buckster. Doubtless there will be a snow storm Thursday night, and a blizzard all day Friday. So the garden is starting to be exciting again, I have my HGV lesson on the last day of the month, test again on the 1st. Hopefully that will be an end of it. Also my Russian is progressing apace (ie slowly!) Now I have to get back to the other ongoing commitments, Taekwondo, and doing my IAM car training. The TKD has been suffering from an extraordinary run of bad luck, and it’s got to the stage now where I expect everyone will have thought I’ve left and I face an embarrassing return. Got to be done though. Once I start again I will be OK, but at the moment it’s an awful temptation just to quit and have an easy life! NO! BAD BUCKY! The car thing as well. I now know I can pass the truck test (driving part) so it seems a waste of time taking the car lessons. Still, I’ve paid for it, and anything that gives me an edge is worth having. Right, got to go and think about dinner and getting ready for work. Live long and prosper, Buck.
Continue readingBastard!
It was the reverse! I failed on the first exercise, before I’d even got out of the gate of the test centre. I said I wasn’t getting it, and I bloody well wasn’t. To rub salt in the wounds the examiner and my instructor both said I had it lined up perfectly to go in the first time, but to me it looked all to bollocks so I took a shunt (which is to drive forwards try reversing again). I ended up needing three shunts, you are only allowed two. Fail. Apparently I also stopped short of the bay, but you are allowed to get out and check (if you haven’t already failed and can’t be arsed), and I dinged a no entry sign with the back of my trailer on the way out for good measure, but it was on the blind side and couldn’t be seen from the cab so I didn’t notice and neither did the examiner. HAH! Score one for the Buck. Then I did an hours drive around an unknown course, with some hideously tight corners that took all my skill and every inch of the road to avoid crashing, and would have passed on that part. I got eleven minor driver faults. You can get fifteen and still pass. That might sound skin of the teeth, but I didn’t make one serious mistake. Not forgetting that on my fourth attempt at a rigid, after forty four hours driving, I passed with fifteen driver errors! That was skin of the teeth! The minors are just little things, one he got me on was when he told me to pull in on the left. I checked my mirrors, indicated when I knew I was safe to do so, then pulled in. I got a minor for not leaving a few seconds between indicating and moving in to the side. I’d checked it, it was safe, but it didn’t give Dolly daydreamer time to wake up and notice the signal. So minors are inevitable. There’s always room for improvement. When you are juggling the amount of information you have to be constantly processing, slight errors will creep in. If I could have nailed that bloody reverse I would be waving a class one license about now. Damn and blast. To remain positive; I now know that if I can suss the reverse manoeuvre I can pass on the road. That, at least, is a huge weight off my mind. Also, I tackled some hideous corners, sight unseen, on my own interpretation of them. This is what I need to pass an employers assessment drive. I more or less know the usual route my works take you on for an assessment. All the bits of it that filled me with stark dread a week ago I now know I can negotiate. I’m taking another four hours on the 31st of March, hammer the reverse and refresh myself on the road, then retaking my test on the 1st. So, […]
Continue readingAaaarrrggghhhhhhh!
Here we go again. Test day tomorrow, bricking it! I was out again today, and I didn’t do too bad. He took me around the worst test course that the test centre has (one so bad he reckons I’m only likely to be taken on it if I get a visiting examiner who is only familiar with that route. He reckons the regular examiners are scared to take an artic with full forty four foot trailer around it!) he talked me around it more than I would have liked ( I’m not sure if that is how it would have gone if I’d have been left to my own interpretation of the situation) but I managed even the tightest corners. Now the test is whether I can interpret a corner as I’m approaching it, get it all slowed to the appropriate speed, appropriate gear, take both lanes if I need to, and take the right line through the corner first time every time, without input from an instructor. Obviously if I can’t I don’t deserve to have the license, but you don’t want your test to be the first time you’ve tried! Also I’m still struggling with my reverse manoeuvre. I couldn’t emulate that brilliant bit of driving from yesterday. It must have been pure luck. Bugger. However, on the penultimate attempt today, he stopped me and explained that I should always be aiming to bring it in using my right hand side. That way you can actually look out of the cab and see where you are going, and you don’t block your vision with your own trailer. Don’t ask me why, it made sense when he was telling me. Anyway, when I tried it like that on my last attempt, I managed to get the damn thing in the bay. All the technical bits I can piss though. Uphill /downhill start, picking a safe place to pull over to stop, angled start around stationary vehicles, etc. So it’s my reverse and interpreting the road correctly tomorrow. Deep breath, don’t panic, just drive. On the bright side, today whilst I was out I refrained from killing a mother with pram. I was tootling along in an apparently hard to spot sixty foot wagon, with only six or seven L plates and three foot high lettering proclaiming it to be a training vehicle, when some dickhead taxi driver overtakes me on the dual carriageway, then pulls straight across my front into a side street. The side street was right in front of the wagon so he had no time to asses the situation, just cut me up and dive for the street. Unfortunately there was a pedestrian already crossing, pushing a pram/ chair thingy. He had to slam on, there was nowhere for me to go so I just had to stand on the brakes, and happily stopped before I hit him. Having sixteen tyres on the road, air brakes, and no load make for nippy braking. I didn’t really […]
Continue readingGetting there
Today has been better. I clipped one pavement, and struggled with that bloody reverse manoeuvre, but other than that it was a lot better. I woke up this morning. and more or less my first thought was ‘hang on, no matter what vehicle you were in, if you were too close to an object steering in to it would not have avoided it’. Double bugger. Any vehicle that has front wheel steering and a fixed set of back wheels must turn around the back axle. The front wheels turn the front of the vehicle but the pivot point must be the rear wheel. In other words if you get the back axle clear of an object you can put your steering on full lock and not hit it. So not only did I take out those railings, but I then deluded myself as to why. The pavement I clipped (OK, mounted, damn you) today was at an offset island. The painted hump in the road was to the right of centre on what would have otherwise been a large open T junction. You were drawn helplessly into steering to the left of the painted island. The instructor warned me to steer straight across it, and that it was a huge temptation to try and steer around the island, but steer straight across it. Even hearing all this, and him saying "don’t steer to the left, don’t steer to the left" as I’m on the island, my hands still moved the wheel over to the left. Damn those treacherous hands! If only there were some way to bring them under control and bend them to my will! Well, that was a pain. the other instance of lack of control on a cornering exercise was where the road was approaching a roundabout. It opened up into two lanes, there were hash markings on the road and a raised pavement with railings. All of these things are clues that the corner is going to be a bastard for trucks. So I went in a bit wide, pinching some of the next lane, got my front into the island then fixated on getting my arse end through without hitting the pavement. I saw it was getting tight so I swang the cab out further into the next lane. Right idea, but I should have gone in holding that line. As it was if there had been anyone beside me I would have squashed them like the insignificant car-driving bug they were. There wasn’t anyone there, thankfully. The other source of stress is that reversing exercise. You have to start in one lane, reverse backwards and to the side to line up in a different lane, with a lane or two (road lanes size) separating them. I’m still having to be told what to do. On my last attempt today I started by doing what he said, then went my own way a bit. Instead of starting the turn, straightening up, moving diagonally across the […]
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