Scissortail Resources
Expert-written guides on truck-mounted attenuators, MASH compliance, fleet maintenance, diesel emissions, medium-duty chassis decisions, and public-sector procurement. Built from real shop experience and real procurement files. 24 articles and growing.
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Truck-mounted attenuators, arrow boards, message boards, and the federal/state rules that govern work-zone safety equipment.
Arrow boards and message boards fail in predictable ways: corroded LED clusters, dead solar charge controllers, failed mast lifts, water-ingressed control modules, and stripped trailer hubs. Field-tested preventive practices that keep boards out of the shop and on the shoulder.
Honest service-life expectations for both the attenuator and the chassis underneath it. We cover what factors actually drive replacement — mileage on the chassis vs. impact history on the attenuator vs. corrosion vs. mounting-bracket fatigue — and when retirement makes more financial sense than a refurb.
What TxDOT and Texas municipalities actually require for work-zone traffic control: TMC-mandated equipment, TxDOT Form 2117 prequalification, attenuator approval lists, arrow board and message board standards, and where state requirements diverge from the federal MUTCD baseline.
Most operators look at the sticker price and miss the rest. We break down the real ten-year cost of owning a truck-mounted attenuator vehicle: chassis depreciation, attenuator replacement after a single crash, MASH recertification, light bar refits, decal cycles, and the labor cost of taking a truck out of service.
TMA and TTMA (trailer-mounted) units protect the same crews but have very different operational profiles. We compare deployment time, maneuverability in tight work zones, fleet utilization, crash-replacement economics, and the situations where each one is the right call.
MASH (Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware) replaced NCHRP 350 as the federal crash-test standard for work-zone safety hardware. We walk through what MASH actually tests, what changed from NCHRP 350, which test levels apply to TMA trucks, and what state DOTs and the FHWA now require on federal-aid projects.
A side-by-side comparison of two of the most common MASH-tested truck-mounted attenuators — the Valtir (formerly Trinity Highway) SS180M and the TrafFix Scorpion II — covering crash performance, stowed footprint, deployment height, maintenance, parts availability, and which one tends to be the better fit for state DOT vs. municipal vs. private contractor operations.
A buyer's checklist for used TMA work trucks: how to verify MASH compliance is still valid, how to inspect the attenuator and its mounting frame for prior impact, what chassis red flags matter most on medium-duty units, and which document trail a serious seller should be able to produce.
Preventive maintenance, DOT inspections, diesel emissions systems, and the costly mistakes that catch fleet operators off guard.
A practical pre-inspection walk-around derived from FMCSA Part 393 and the CVSA North American Standard inspection: brakes, lights, tires, coupling devices, fuel and exhaust systems, and the eight categories that put trucks out of service most often.
Summer breaks diesel trucks in specific ways: cooling-system stress, A/C failures, tire blowouts on hot pavement, DEF degradation in heat, and battery sulfation. A pre-summer PM pass that hits each of these in roughly the right order before peak temperatures arrive.
The decision isn't binary. We walk through the unit economics of each option — fully-loaded technician cost, bay overhead, parts inventory, after-hours availability, and what fleet size makes each model break even — and the hybrid setups that work best for fleets in the 10-to-50-truck range.
Manufacturer intervals are a starting point, not gospel. We share the duty-cycle-adjusted PM schedule we use for service trucks and TMA trucks in stop-and-go work-zone duty — oil/filter, DEF, fuel filters, coolant, brakes, drivetrain — and the warning signs that say it's time to tighten the interval.
Patterns from real fleets: skipping coolant changes, ignoring DPF differential pressure trends, running cheap fuel filters, deferring brake jobs past the next inspection cycle, mismatched tire pressures, and the financial damage each one causes once it compounds.
Diesel particulate filters, diesel exhaust fluid, and regen cycles are the single most common cause of unplanned downtime on post-2010 medium-duty trucks. We explain how each subsystem actually works, what fault codes mean, and the operating practices that keep regen events from cascading into a clogged DPF.
Maintenance budgets rarely creep — they jump. We look at the predictable inflection points (fleet age, mileage thresholds, emissions-system aging, deferred-PM compounding, technician labor inflation) and how to forecast them before they show up as variance against budget.
New vs. used decisions, chassis comparisons, total cost of ownership, and what to look at before signing for a medium-duty truck.
The two most common medium-duty chassis on the market for service trucks, TMA trucks, and dump bodies. We compare powertrain options (Cummins B6.7 vs. Cummins B6.7), cab ergonomics, parts/dealer footprint, resale value, and which one tends to win in different operating profiles.
Operating lease, capital lease, TRAC lease, and outright purchase — each one has a different cash-flow and tax profile. A plain-English walk-through of when each structure makes sense, with examples drawn from medium-duty service trucks and traffic-control equipment.
Lead times on new medium-duty chassis are still long, used inventory turns fast, and the depreciation curve on a three-to-five-year-old truck is favorable. A framework for deciding when new is worth the wait and when a well-vetted used unit is the better business decision.
How to build a defensible TCO model for fleet equipment: acquisition cost, financing, fuel, scheduled maintenance, unscheduled repairs, parts, tires, insurance, downtime cost, residual value, and the disposal end. A worked example for a Class 6 service truck.
A pre-purchase inspection framework that goes beyond the engine and transmission: frame and crossmember condition, suspension wear patterns, emissions-system service history, electrical aging signs, and the paperwork that should accompany any serious commercial-truck transaction.
Public-sector procurement, cooperative purchasing contracts, equipment specifications, and how to write bids that actually get fulfilled.
On the buyer side: vague delivery terms, missing warranty language, no spare-parts pricing, no progress payments on builds. On the vendor side: ignoring small RFP details, missing required forms, late submissions, and lowball pricing that becomes a money-losing change-order war. The mistakes we see most.
Sourcewell, BuyBoard, TIPS, OMNIA, HGAC, NASPO ValuePoint — the major cooperative purchasing organizations that let governmental entities skip the full bid process. How each one works, what equipment categories they cover, and how to confirm a vendor is actually on the contract you're piggybacking.
Under the hood of public-sector fleet procurement: budget cycles, RFP vs. ITB vs. RFQ, sole-source justifications, sealed-bid mechanics, cooperative-purchasing piggybacks, and the political and statutory constraints that shape every step. Practical guidance for both buyers and vendors.
Specs that are too tight only one vendor can bid; specs that are too loose let the cheapest bidder deliver something unusable. A template-driven approach to writing fleet equipment specifications that get competitive bids without sacrificing what your operators actually need.
Call the shop. Email sales. We sell trucks, service fleets, and answer the phone — and we'd rather give you a straight answer than have you guess off a spec sheet.