KURT DANIELSON
Vice President, Sales & Marketing,
Bridgestone Bandag Tire Solutions

Have you gotten back to the basics?

According to legend, when baseball great Ted Williams was in a slump, he would practice endlessly. Occasionally, he would pull out a small booklet, look at it, then put it into his pocket.

It was an official Little League batting guide, and Williams was making sure he wasn’t missing anything basic.

In this issue of Real Answers, we explore some basics that might be helpful as we emerge from this slump in our industry.

Nothing is more basic than safety, and by the time you read this, the 2009 Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Roadcheck will have occurred. Fleet managers rarely get to see what goes on at Roadcheck, so we visited the 2008 event to report on it for you.

We also visited Boyd & Sons of Washington, Indiana. Originally a family farm, it has grown – and grown. Every day, Steve Boyd and his sons look at their resources and ask a basic question: “How can we get more out of them?”

We’ll also report on a new Bridgestone on/off-highway drive, the L320, with a simple-looking design, but which delivers solid traction even as it wears.

And since there’s almost nothing more basic than traction, we’ll show how those little slits in your treads perform the basic but essential task of helping you grip the road. We discuss the optimum time to retread those casings too, so you’ll get as much as you can from them.

Plus, we consider ways to convert non-paying load into payload. If you’ve got to move the weight, it might as well be weight that pays the bills.

For fun, we’ll look inside that most basic of tire tools, the air pressure gauge, visit a trade show for collectors of toy trucks, and diagnose what looks like damage from “tire termites.”

Basically, all you have to do is turn the page.