Crow hopping and SnapPadsUpdated a year ago

While some people have voiced their concerns that the grippy rubber will interfere with the rigs normal operation, as a company, we haven’t seen very many issues of this nature. "Crow hopping" (when a rig skids forward) can damage SnapPads. While the SnapPads are robust and made of tough stuff, they can tear under the shear force generated by the weight of a coach crow-hopping forward. We see this damage as the metal jack foot forcing its way through the front of the pad.

From our understanding, particular rigs are prone to doing so, and some manufactures claim that they are "designed" to do it. When retracting the feet you can try to avoid crow hopping by not performing an "ALL RETRACT" of the feet, but bringing up the front and rear feet alternately in short retractions. We have also heard from Equalizer that manually raising the front jacks prior to auto-retracting will reduce the crow hop. Another customer told us that starting the rig, putting it in neutral, letting off the air brake and then hitting lower allows the rear tires to rotate slightly as it lowers and worked to alleviate his problem.