When my tail lift almost failed me mid delivery

[bwtom]

I had a delivery day recently that didn’t go as smoothly as I expected, and my tail lift ended up being the main problem.

The morning started normal. My truck liftgate was working fine with lighter loads and I didn’t think much of it. Everything felt routine until I got to one of my heavier stops.

That’s when I noticed something was off. The tail lift would still run, the pump was clearly working, but as soon as I put any real weight on it, the power just wasn’t there. It would slow down a lot or struggle to lift the pallet properly. Empty it still moved, but under load it felt like it was fighting itself.

At first I thought maybe I had pushed it a bit too far with the weight, so I tried to adjust and split the load. But even with lighter sections, the liftgate was clearly weaker than normal. That’s when it started to get stressful because I still had multiple stops left and I couldn’t afford to fully break down on site.

I ended up changing my whole loading approach just to get through the day. Smaller lifts, more trips, slower pace, just trying to keep everything safe and avoid making the situation worse.

What stuck with me was how quickly a “small weakness” in the liftgate turned into a real operational problem during work. It didn’t completely fail, but it definitely wasn’t reliable under pressure.

I managed to finish the route, but it was one of those days where you start paying a lot more attention to your equipment afterwards.