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to
loors and doors may not be the sexiest :ern on the specification sheet, but corn them at your peril. Unless they re right for the job, the repair costs an soon mount up. Sharon Clancy eports.
oors and floors are a bit like houseplants: some will cope with and thrive in hostile environments, but others will have a short life. With the ide choice of floors and doors .railable, it is now easier to minnise those in-service repair costs ithout paying a hefty premium.
For many years, the traditional ooring for trailers was hardwood uch as Keruing from the Far ast. Hardwood is robust enough ) be exposed to the weather so uits flats and drop-sided bodies. lowever, it is heavier than ply
wood or aluminium and can gain up to 200kg in weight through moisture absorption. Moisture also causes it to expand and contract, so the seal with the chassis rails is rarely tight, allowing road dirt to penetrate. It takes longer to lay, too, which eats into cost savings.
Laminated hardwood floors have emerged as one solution. Lengths of hardwood with halflaps to adjoining boards are bonded together to make a fulllength floor, with a laminated phenolic resin coating to protect against moisture. Replacing a worn length without damaging its adjacent partner can be diffi cult, though. Omega floors are designed to overcome this. They have galvanised steel top-hat sections with inset laminated hardwood or plywood panels. The panels fit between the sections and damaged ones are easy to replace. Birch ply flooring, with or without a laminated phenolic coating, is light. It originally suffered from a reputation for poor wear and a cheap-and-cheerful image, but that is no longer justified, says importers.
"Plywood floors are not just a cheaper alternative to hardwood," says Ben Fowles, sales director for Vincent Timber. "They are highly engineered products manufactured to cope specifically with the demands of transport."
Wear resistance
Laminated floors typically have a weatherproof coating on the underside and a topcoat of varying thickness and pattern on the upper side, depending on how much wear resistance and grip is required.
Floor thicknesses vary depending on the material, how hardwearing it has to be and what point loadings it has to cope with. Floor thickness on dry-freight trailers ranges from 2 I mm through to 31mm and on rigids from 1.4. to 20mm.
Plywood floors are often rated according to the fork-lift truck loads they can cope with, and for wear characteristics, Floors will typically have a 5.25 or 7.2 tonne rating. Kogel, for example, uses a 7.2-tonne-rated floor as standard.
Cartwright sales director Mark Jones points out that floors have to cope with dynamic as well as static loads. "Spacing of the crossbearers is important if you are loading by pallet for fork-lift truck." Trarnlining is common on floors in this sort of operation, says Jones, and it's caused by the high point loads, "Rear-axle point loads on some pallet truck loads are very high because the wheels are so close together." Some floors have been subject to a rolling test to indicate how well the floor will cope with tramlining. Finnish wood and paper group UPM-Kyrnmene is wellknown in the transport sector for its Wisa-Trans and Wisa-Truck phenolic-coated plywood floors. Wisa-Trans has been tested to 8o o,000 rolling test cycles while Wisa-Truck is designed for more arduous applications and has been tested to over a million.
If you want to compare wear properties of floors, look out for Taber value. This DIN 53799 test rolls a small abrasive wheel over a floor surface to determine the wear rate. The higher the number of revolutions, the more wearresistant the floor.
Cost-conscious
Advanced Technical Panels claims to be the largest supplier of vehicle flooring in the UK. It sources boards on a global basis. "Finnish birch has the reputation of being the best available, and indeed, we offer it in our Buffalo Board range," says David Briggs, sales manager. "However, we also source products from the Far East Eastern Europe, ruse they offer a per and acceptable :native for cost-con
us operators." :kdeck, ATP's latest r, for example, is an aomy floor for box s and curtainsiders comes in 12, 15, 18 21min thicknesses. olyfont-TPI has just oduced its one-piece ltifloor to the UK mar Constructed like a P panel, the topcoat has an negnated pattern on the sun which is said to offer greater ir resistance than traditional molic surfacesBecause it is !piece, fitting time is reduced. :omes lfl 14, 18 and 20MM :knesses for dry-freight bodies up to ioomm thick in insuNd form.
Uuminium floors have strength and weight advantages over hardwood floors designed to take the same load but, says Jones, are out of fashion on dry-freight bodies. "Weight is no longer an issue for many operators, so the extra cost isn't justified."
Aluminium remains popular on insulated bodies because it creates a waterproof floor pan. The grade of aluminium and the embossed pattern both have vital roles in noise levels and wear characteristics. Trolley Deck, for example, is a new heavy-duty non-slip pattern from Normanton developed especially to cope with rollcages.
Aluminium floors
It is made in hard 5o86 grade aluminium and the small pattern means that 49% of the surface area is raised compared with 17% on the company's Triple Grip aluminium floors. "Heavy loads on aluminium floors affect the floor like a rolling pin on pastry," explains managing director David Smith. lithe metal is not hard enough the material stretches, fasteners snap and the floor will lift at the edges."
Cambridge-based Marshall SV has developed a new aluminium floor in conjunction with Hydro Aluminium Profiler UK. The Litadek is for vehicl up to 7.5 tonnes gross and tl aluminium ribbed extrusioi are claimed to be 40% light size-for-size than a convention zimm thick phenolic-faced pl wood floor.
On 3.5-tonners, it can be la transversely over longitudin runners, eliminating the net for cross-bearers.
Southfields Safeloada is bast on an advanced Krone span frame semi-trailer chassi whose main chassis membe, are at the sides rather than th centre line of the trailer. A se. ondary floor between the lowt members of the space frarn creates a self-contained loa compartment below norm chassis level.
Crash tests by Krone hav shown significant reductions i the likelihood of injury to pede! trians or cyclists striking th chassis, as well as a reduction i. damage.