As business continues to innovate and become more competitive, it is becoming more and more important for businesses to get the most out of their capital equipment purchases. One area where West-Trans has seen a big step forward over the recent past, is in the application of hook lifts.
While the traditional use of hook lifts has been in the waste and recycling sectors, more and more we see them moving into the building and infrastructure construction, and mining and exploration sectors. Many would be familiar seeing a hook lift carrying a large waste bin, however, innovative customers are now building custom bodies which they load and unload quickly and easily to optimise their primary asset, the truck.
A recent example is a small excavation company. The excavator is loaded into a tipper body style bin, and lifted onto the vehicle. Both bin and excavator are taken to the job site and dropped. The excavator is able to work all day, filling the bin/tipper, without tying up an expensive piece of equipment, while the truck goes and tips a bin of loaded fill, or relocates another excavator and bin to a new job site.
In the mining sector, we are seeing a leaf taken out of the military play book, with bodies being constructed for remote camp support units, fitted with water tanks, diesel tank and generators, or relocatable kitchens or workshops. The units are simply taken to site, dropped, and left for a week, a month or a year, providing the crew with the resources needed to be safe comfortable and efficient.
Improving the efficiency of a hook lift fitted truck a step further, the use of a custom dog trailer is becoming very popular. In applications where the vehicle may be travelling for several hours between lift and drop/empty, such as a remote camp site, or transfer stations to processing site, the investment of an extra 10 minutes to place a bin on a dog trailer, and carting two bins, far out weights cost and time required to do multiple trips.
West-Trans Equipment is now offering the West-Trans built custom dog trailers, as either a tipping trailer, or simple rail and lock trailer, as a matched combination to its tough and ever reliable HL20 and HL20A Hook Lifts. The driver simply drops the trailer, lifts the first bin onto the truck, reverses back to the trailer and places the bin on the trailer, lifts the second bin onto the truck, reconnects the trailer and hydraulics, locks both bins, and drives away. The custom dog trailers can also be supplied with a swing away “West-Transcover” tarp tower system, meaning the driver never needs to climb onto a vehicle to secure the load. The West-Transcover tarp towers are unique, in that they are air lifted, with an electric tarp retract motor, rather than heavy and more complex hydraulic lifts and motors. This makes them almost half the weight of a traditional hydraulic tarp tower system, and also around 30% cheaper to supply and fit.
Visit www.west-trans.com.au or call 1300 877 411 and speak to West-Trans specialist for more information.
West-Trans, Built tough in Australia for more than 25 years.