It’s true that concrete is nothing more than sand, gravel, water and cement. However, the ratio of these ingredients is critical to making good concrete. Specifically, the ratio of sand to gravel. Too much sand makes for easy finishing, but weak concrete. Too much rock and there’s not enough sand to finish the mud at all.
Location, location, location. The first rule in opening a business, right? Well, it’s even true for a trailer based concrete yard, just not in the same way it’s true for, say, a coffee shop. You want your coffee shop in a well trafficked area where people will see it often; like the main drag in town. It’s a bit different for a Cart-Away concrete mixing trailer location.
Perhaps you’ve used a concrete mixing trailer to make a small pour around your house. Maybe you’ve used one in connection with your job. However you came into contact with trailer based concrete, a lot of you are talking about selling it yourself.
Maybe you are in the construction field and have used ready mix in a concrete mixer trailer. Perhaps you’re a DYI-er that’s used a short load of concrete for a home project. Or, you might have a current business and have decided to add a new profit center. Whatever the reason, you are thinking about trailered concrete mixers as a way to turn a profit. For over twenty years Cart-Away has been helping people decide if selling concrete at retail is right for them, and in that course of time we’ve come up with five steps to help customers be successful.
I’ve posted about towing a cement mixer and the various types of couplers. In the larger models of concrete mixing trailers (Cart-Away’s CMT-100 and CMK-175, Trailer Haul's MT125, Concrete Titan, etc) I’ve mentioned the brake actuator, but never explained what that does and why one doesn’t see them on the smaller mixers. Smaller cement mixers, sometimes called portable contractor mixers, vary in size but are rarely large enough to require brakes.
As I said in another post, one yard mixer trailers weigh about 7000 pounds when fully loaded. Cart-Away Concrete Systems even makes a mixing trailer that has a 10,000 pound GVW (the MixKing). The towing hitch, brake actuator, and towing ball must all be rated for that weight.
Towing a portable cement mixer seems pretty straight forward: hook it up to your truck and go, right? Well, not quite so fast. Like everything else that looks easy to do, there are some thing to know. The larger the cement mixer, the more you have to pay attention to. The contractor type, single axle towable mixer is fairly simple and has few options regarding towing. Some have just a loop of steel on the front and are made to slip into a pintle hitch.
Small towable cement mixers, the six to twelve cubic foot models, generally don’t have any way to adjust the tongue weight they put on a vehicle. This is just fine because unless you have a hitch that’s three feet off the ground, the manufacturers have put the axle in the most optimal location for towing. Additionally, the units weigh next to nothing and add little weight to the towing vehicle.
If you have worked concrete often enough you can recognize good concrete either by looking inside the cement mixer or watching as it comes out of the mixer and goes into the wheelbarrow or form.
