Not in my experience. How about the rest of the truck? Usually a 12,000 pound front is found in a highway tractor. Is this a former highway truck that someone boxed up? If so, does the rest of the components stack to doing the task you intend to do? Does it have rear suspension and frames rails up to the task? I used to order 18000 pound fronts. They are not a lot of fun empty on the right stretch of road and on one truck before air suspended cabs were the common and I had to put an air cab kit in that particular truck because when I had the dump gear off of it, as a tractor the ride was brutal empty. Subsequent purchases had 20,000 fronts however, they were heavy haul tractors with triple steel frames and heavy rears so we could dump the jeeps out and take a yarder or a log loader up in the woods. We had 6' sliding fifth wheels and routinely would transfer 20 to 22,000 to the nose to get to 43,000 on the drivers under permit on highway. The dump truck was a 3 axle and good for 52,000 gross 34,000 on the drives and 18,000 (with additional tonnage) on the front with duplex front tires. With a 212 inch wheel base which was the norm at the time for a 14' box you had to load it tight to the front to make the weights work and the State of Washington used to write me a ticket for 2000 over on the front every so often. One other reason I didn't put 12,000 pound fronts in vocational rides was a liability issue... I never wanted to be seated in the defendants chair in a court of law explaining to a prosecuting attorney how it was I had had a catastrophic front axle failure while he was waving around a fistful of weight tickets showing I had routinely loaded 16,000 on the front and recklessly hurled my self upon the traveling public and now someone was dead because my equipment was not and never had been up to the task. That said there are a lot of highway truck dump trucks rattling around out there that haven't had an issue ever and they are much cheaper. Do your study, it is a large investment no matter how you slice it.
