MATS 2013 attendees were treated to a demonstration video of the Roller Rak that owner-operator John Rodriguez had filmed on a winter day in Texas with 35-mph winds — terrible day for tarping a high load. You can find the vid on my Facebook page here.While most other tarping aids are more or less stationary systems or less-functional tools, the Roller Rak’s two primary pieces can fairly simply travel with the truck and secure to whatever flat deck you’re pulling via two-inch straps during use. Its genesis is in hard-won experience Baytown, Texas-based Rodriguez has gotten pulling flats for Mercer and previously as an independent small-fleet operator. He slipped and fell while tarping tall loads on his 2013 Great Dane 48-ft. spread-axle flatbed in ice and snow twice over the course of a month and said to himself, “there has to be a better way.”
Over the course of months he conducted nearly 250 interviews with fellow open-deck haulers and others and then began to put together the design for the Roller Rak. The “machine will give you the capability to go 10 feet up” from deck height, he says, without climbing on top of the load. Today, Rodriguez’s running the Roller Rak prototype, whose all-aluminum design weighs just 127 pounds with no single piece of it heavier than 72 pounds, on the flatbed and saving loads of time himself.
Keep an eye out for announcements of potential availability this year on the Roller Rak Facebook page, should Rodriguez and Lancon get everything in order for a product launch. And tell us what you think about it here in the comments.
