What compost weighs depends on how much moisture is in that compost. The weight of one cubic yard of compost could range from about 1,000 pounds to 1,600 pounds and there is no way any passenger car was designed to haul that much.
It is not a good idea to overfill the tires, even if carrying excess weight. That causes you to loose even more contact with the pavement and can cause those tires to over heat which shortens the life and could cause a blowout.
When loading your car watch the rear and when it sags, or dips, a bit you have put enough of a load in. If the rear springs go level you have too much weight for that vehicle.

Thanks for the automotive advice Kimmsr. I won't ever put that much weight in my car again. I'm glad it's driving fine this morning.

Pt03, wish I had thought of taking a picture but none exist thankfully.

GREAT POST! I got family in Fenton. Good tip with the cutoff bucket. Enjoy your compost. You should forward this to Jeff Foxworthy :)

Ummm yeah, classic whacko behaviour. You may be beyond any hope of rehabilitation. Welcome to the club. What kimmsr said about the leaf springs is my guideline as well, though I've exceeded it many times. The weight estimate is about right, too - roughly the equivalent of taking four sumo wrestlers to a pie-eating contest (or home from one).

A few months ago I was driving on the highway and saw a Ford F-250 with 4 pieces of train track strapped in the back. The rear window was completely gone and the roof of his cab was now v-shaped.

I have learned, because I do stuff like this all the time, never to buy new cars. I usually have an old small pick-up with a homemade rack on the back. The best sedan I ever had was an '86 Saab 900. With the seats folded flat, and the handles lowered, I could carry my Troy-built rototiller... and a few bags of compost, too.

Thanks for the smile.

For future reference...

For starters, ditch the Camry. Get something German with a fairly stiff suspension like a Mercedes or an Audi. Porsches are particularly good. Forget about the bags. Carefully line the trunk with a tarp, making sure it covers the sides, particularly the back of the seats. Then shovel the stuff in. Periodically push down on the back of the car to make sure the suspension isn't too overloaded. If it bounces reasonably well when you push on it, it is still OK. If the compost is pretty dry, you may be able to fill up the whole trunk and put some buckets in the back seat. If it's wet, the trunk may end up only half full.

You could always use a {{gwi:268179}}.

Lloyd

I removed the carpets in my car and replaced them with plastic. I had the garage do this. The cloth back seats were covered with vinyl. The front cloth seats have vinyl seat covers. Now, I can load Starbucks coffee grounds into my car and if the bag breaks or leaks I can wipe it up with sponge. My car does not smell like old coffee. It really does save money over paying to the carpets shampooed and the seats cleaned by a detailer. I don't know why any one would want cloth and carpet and leather is not water proof.

I have gotten about 2 and a half yards of leaf compost in a regular length bed 1/2 ton pickup. This was damp compost outside. I suspect that much weighed close to 2000 pounds..

Here's the YouTube link for this great video:

Best Way to Haul Half Cubic Yard of Compost in Your Car to Enrich Your Garden

I'm frequently the parking lot entertainment at our nearby Home Depot, due to what I can and do haul in my car. Compost, potting soil, bricks, sand, cement, lumber, etc. When I'm working on a project, sometimes most of that list in one trip. Usually guys stare, then they come tell me it won't fit, then they stand around and stare some more, until I get it in and drive off. And they walk off shaking their heads. But honestly, I can get more in my Bonneville than in my DH's little pick-up. Sometimes I have the p-u and buy too much, because I forget that's the vehicle I have that day. And those leather seats in my Bonneville wipe off just fine!

Those are learning experiences, and make great stories to tell your grandchildren. Once we bought a twin size mattress and strapped it to the top of a camry to drive home. That was fun.

Once I thought I was being smart, saving a delivery free of a measly (at least in retrospect) $40 by picking up the tile for our house in my F150. I figured, hey, I had a truck, why should I pay delivery. Well, $40 is cheap when you consider I had to make 2 trips in my truck because the tile was so heavy. Live and learn, maybe.

I bring plastic tubs to my friends horse farm and fill them up as we clean stalls. I then load them into my Forester and drive home with the windows half way open. If they are all the way open, the light stuff (hay, shavings, sawdust) flies all over the inside of the car.

"If they are all the way open, the light stuff (hay, shavings, sawdust) flies all over the inside of the car."

I'm smiling because this must have been an interesting learning experience.

Lloyd

I use the big rubbermaid bins for hauling compost. It takes some oomph to lift them up into the car, but they're stackable and less likely to rip and spill compost all over your carpet and seats. You'd be surprised how many you can fit in a sedan. I much prefer borrowing my sister's truck, though.

i use the big totes as well

Lol Lloyd,I'm glad I made you smile, the stuff was everywhere! Some of the manure was pretty ripe, so driving with the windows closed was NOT an option! :-)

This thread says much about how sad it that the full size family sedan is dead.
I drive a '92 Buick Roadmaster and if I need to hall dirt or compost I have trailer, but I have found that combining the trailer and Roadmaster I can do in one trip what would take two with just the car or trailer if I am transporting bagged material.
I also found I can get eight standard sized bales in the Roadmaster, trunk and passenger compartment, if I do not mind not being albe to see out of the rear or side windows.
If I do seven visibility is not bad at all.
When a round trip is one hundred miles often that saves time and money.

I second the comment about the car tire pressure. The correct tire pressure for a particular car IS NOT the max pressure listed on the tire sidewall. The correct pressure is listed on the side of the door, glove box, and probably the owners manual. The car maker looks at MPG, road holding, and safety to come up with a recommended pressure. Very few individuals know more than the engineers and are capable of exceeding the recommended tire pressure.

One time I think someone did make a mistake was on my 1987 Ford Festive (Korean cheapee). The tires still had tread at 52xxx, and they were only 12"! Since there is no free lunch, so to speak, they had awful braking capability. Once I jammed on the brakes on the highway exit in a light rain, and the car came to a stop 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

One reason a car maker will have a different pressure from the tire manuf. max pressure number listed on the tire --- one tire model will go on a number of different makes and models of cars.

There are two other common misunderstood ideas about cars. Jumper cables and the oil light.

I got so irked one April afternoon in 1991 thinking about the gorgeous chipped leaf/seaweed/lobstershell compost that I left behind at my ex-husband's house the autumn before that I found myself there, shoveling compost directly into the carpeted rear compartment of my little Ford Escort station wagon. The car was never the same, but I hauled that wormy cargo home feeling pretty pleased with myself.

Annpat, you're now in the hall of fame for people who heroically shovel stuff into inappropriate places, right up there with Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Big thumbs up!

Had lots and lots of fun yesterday. Collected another 1 cubic yard of really good compost (27 cubic feet). Last time I did that was about a year ago. Thought I'd post in the same thread from last year. Used my Camry again to haul the stuff, but this year, I made 2 trips to haul the cubic yard--much friendlier on the car's suspension. Can't believe I was able to fit a full cubic yard of compost into my car last year. Won't do that again though. Yesterday I loaded from 60 to 66 percent of the cubic yard into the car for the first trip and I loaded the remaining compost in the second trip. Much, much better to do it that way. In fact, a 50/50 split may have been even better. It's hard to gauge the 50/50 mark though on a cubic yard.

Went to STL Compost in Fenton again, just outside St. Louis county. Got their Field and Turf compost again, instead of their Black Gold, even though I'll mostly be using it in the vegetable garden, not so much on the lawn. IIRC, last year their Black Gold smelled a bit, meaning it wasn't really ready yet to be used as compost, but I didn't detect much, if any, bad smell this year from their Black Gold. Their Bessie's Best is part manure and their premium is a mix of Black Gold and Bessie's Best, IIRC. I think the Field and Turf is like the Black Gold but finer for lawn use. Still their Field and Turf worked great in my vegetable garden last year. Lots and lots of tomatoes, eggplants, squash, string(?) beans, basal, parsley, finnochio (fennel?), and it was all top quality. Good compost seems to help so much.

I stored the compost in my garage overnight, because I was too tired yesterday to move it behind the bushes. Later today I'll take it all outside. Nice thing is this compost does NOT smell bad at all. It's been in my closed garage all night, and not a hint of foul smell. This is really good compost!

This year I fit the cubic yard into about 28 or 30 big plastic bags. Last year it was just about 20 or 22 plastic bags. It's much, much better to use 30 bags than 20 bags, because each bag is much lighter and easier to carry by hand. My back thanked me.

I pushed the compost into the bags with an oversized rubber glove. Much easier than shoveling. Important thing to do, as I may have mentioned last year in this thread, is to control the opening of the plastic bag with a 5-gallon bucket whose bottom has been cut out. Lay the bucket sideways on the ground with the plastic bag attached behind, and just shove compost into the bucket-bag combo. You can work fast that way--much better than a shovel, I think, like that YouTube person recommended. I think I may have provided a link to the YouTube video last year in this thread, or in a different thread.

It took about 15 to 17 rubber-gloved shoves of compost to fill each bag to the right weight for me. Twenty or more shoves caused the bags to be too heavy and not easy to carry.

Last year, I used 2-millimeter thick bags that were much tougher to tear. This year I used 1-millimeter thick plastic bags, and must have torn 5. Don't use 1-millimeter thick bags (go for 2 mm) because you can even tear the thinner bags while your handling them with just your hands inside your car, not just on the abrasive ground. My hands tore a hole in a bag just while lifting the bag when it was already inside my car's trunk, to reposition the bag. Two millimeters will save you time and energy. Once a bag is torn, you have to place it inside a second bag. I can't emphasize enough how much happier you will be using 2-millimeter thick bags over 1-millimeter.

It took me about 2 hours to shove 60 to 66 percent of the cubic yard of compost into the plastic bags, and about another 1 hour to shove the remaining third of the cubic yard on my second car trip. So the glove-shoving alone took about 3 hours, then there's drive-time to add onto that, and unloading the bags from the car, and the preparation, etc. I also ate and rested a bit between the two trips. All-in-all it was about a 5-hour project for a cubic yard.

Last year, I did it when it was nice and warm. This year it was windy and cold, probably between 45* F and 55* F. Much better to do it when warm, and not windy.

Still no pictures?

Lloyd

Lol. Still no pictures.

Forgot to add: these were 55-gallon plastic bags (this year and last).

Also the Field and Turf compost has climbed in price by more than 10 percent this year. Went up from $29 per cubic yard to 32.

Something occurred to me yesterday. Do you guys think they treat the Field and Turf compost with less of an eye toward human safety than their Black Gold or Bessie's Best composts because most people use the Field and Turf on their lawns while the Black Gold and Bessie's are used in the vegetable garden.

Like I mentioned, the Field and Turf is finer in texture than the Black Gold and Bessie's Best, but I hope they don't treat it with lower safety standards because it's used more for lawns than veggie gardens?

I'm just guessing but I think it has more to do with how fine they screen it. Lawn people want relatively fine product and garden people don't mind it a bit chunkier.

Lloyd

Ther are some nice covers for pets for use in cars. I have a hatchback, which is of course not the same but they have straps to keep it in place, that are like a U shape that protects seat and floor of backseats. I guess if you don't do this often, it may not be worth it, though.