Everyone under the sun has decided to rip truck drivers off.
I have a few trucks leased onto company's. Honestly I enjoy driving but hate the office side of things. That's why I do that. I only run my truck under my authority. Back to the subject at hand. I have a driver that has been bugging me about wanting his own trailer. With the prices the way they are I wasn't going for it. I found a 2000 dry van for 6k. Went to look at it. It needed doors to the point that you couldn't safely drive on the road. So I bought it and bought two new door panels and new hinges. Thinking I'll be smart and put the hinges on myself to save time and money from the shop that will hang them. Most of the shops i called had a 3 week wait. I found one that had availability. This guy says their hourly rate was 120 per hour. I thought that's fine. Then he tells me "the book says it's an 8 hour job" I said all you need to do is hang the doors. Literally 10 nuts and bolts. 5 on each door. He said "we go by the book on rates" Now I super pissed. I 600 miles from home with doors that won't close. I go to the truck stop to cool off. Of course the truck stop shop won't do it at all. I'm parked in the south 40 of the truck stop by myself in the middle of the day. When a truck starts backing in right next to me. I annoyed because the truck stop is empty. So I look out the window and it's a flatbed with one of those little forklifts on the back. I got out and asked the guy if he'd be willing to help me out. He said yes and I kid you not we had removed the old doors and hung the new ones in less than an hour. He kept refusing to take money from me but finally settled on 20 bucks for lunch money. I still had to attach the new rubber and switch the rods from old to new but I did that by myself with my ladder. It's just ridiculous that the shop wanted to charge me 8 hours for something that took me less than 1 hour. I went through a similar situation back in February trying to have my DPF and DOC cleaned. They told be 4 hours to take them off and 4 hours to put them back on. I did it myself. Literally 3 very large clamps and 2 small clamps were all that held them on. I took them to the shop for cleaning and reinstalled them myself. You do need 2 ratchet straps because they are heavy. Use the straps to hold them in place while you line the clamps up.