Technology of various kinds — infrared scanners, lasers, photographic plate readers and the like — have revolutionized the way weigh stations work over the last 20 and more years. Such technology has been the subject of Overdrive reporting from time to time, and all the changes were not lost on Big Rig Videos’ Chris Fiffie. (You can read more about former driver Fiffie in this story about how his Big Rig Videos Youtube Channel and Facebook page came into being.)
Noticing all the tech on his travels around the country filming spots with truckers, Fiffie was on his way down I-75 past the Wildwood weigh station in Florida when he considered stopping in to “ask if I can produce a film” about the work that inspectors do. “I decided against that and placed a phone call to the station, explaining who I was and what I wanted to do.”
After getting passed up the chain and hearing at every turn what a great idea inspectors and supervisors thought it was, ultimately he landed with the public relations department of the State of Florida, which gave him the green light.
Florida DOT Senior Inspector Dennis Hegman was Fiffie’s ultimate source for the film that resulted.“I knew right off the bat that the film would not hold an attention span if the average semi was used,” Fiffie says. Known for his film work detailing the day-in-day-out work of haulers in custom trucks, Fiffie quickly made the proximate connection between the Wildwood scale location and Overdrive‘s 2014 Pride & Polish event, then-upcoming at the 75 Chrome Shop, likewise in Wildwood.
“I started talking to drivers I knew would be attending and got them on board,” Fiffie says, for what might go down in history as the first custom-truck convoy ever with a weigh station as its ultimate destination. With those operators, ultimately, he got the scenes he needed for what follows in the final video below.
It’s a fascinatingly candid, half-hour look that proceeds primarily from those scenes and, most importantly, a four-hour talk with Dennis Hegman of the Florida DOT, who details just how the station operates and, over the course of the video, opens up to the more human side of the back-and-forth between law enforcement and the trucking community. Enjoy.
The following truckers were featured in the video:
David Foster
Troy Huddleston
Jay Palachuck
Hayden Eady
Scoobey Meltcher
Paul Rissler
Shawn Cielke
Dave Brendel
Chad Betland
David Meadows
Bryan Dax
Lou Deberadinis
Rick Johnson
Doug Scholten
Danny Abrams
Chad Gomola
Jesse Shirey
