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While truck engines and gearboxes go through their respective developmental evolutions on drawing boards across the oceans, South Africa's trucking community is just as busy designing truck trailers and bodies that will carry cargo more efficiently and profitably. In the highly competitive road freight industry, every extra kilo of payload assists in boosting bottom line performance. For this reason, the trend among trailer builders these days is to produce trailers and truck bodies with the lightest possible tare mass to allow for as much payload as is legally permitted within gross vehicle mass restrictions. It's an envelope that's constantly being pushed, with new approaches to design and fabrication pitting durability against mass in search of the perfect solution, writes
Paul Collings
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The forces driving innovations in truck trailer and body design have much to do with the increasingly competitive transport environment where margins are wafer-thin and customers continue to pit one operation against the other to secure the lowest-possible transport rates. In addition, the increasingly stringent control on overloading by Government is effectively forcing transporters to purchase low tare trailers and trucks in order to maximise payload within legal limits.
In essence, fitting a load body or trailer to a truck has become more than a just an engineering execution. It has become an exact science where the purchase price of the product needs to be weighed up against its total lifecycle cost. Determining the eventual 'return on investment' of a load body or trailer means adding a number of elements to the equation, the most important being payload capacity and maintenance costs.
What it all boils down to, once materials, running gear, components and manufacturer have been selected, is the trade-off between strength and tare mass to maximise payload and choosing the best running gear for the application to reduce operating costs.
The following pages of this Special Report on Trailers present insights into what our local trailer experts are doing in pushing the proverbial envelope without breaking it. Given the intense activity within the construction sector, it is apt that an increased focus is placed on tipper bodies.
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Tankers,
tippers, tautliners
and pantecs are all ‘going lighter’ with designers looking at
all the options to reduce tare. From lighter rims, axles and
suspension, to landing legs and mudguards, every single component
has to be selected according to its mass-to-strength ratio, as do
the various materials used to make the trailer chassis and
body. |
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