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Many Uses for Tipping Semis
Page 97
Page 98
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THE name tipper gives the implication to most people of a vehicle which will spend a large part of its working life off the road—on building sites, in quarries and so on. An articulated outfit, on the other band, is generally accepted as being most unsuitable for these conditions, so a tipping semi-trailer is something of a paradox.
In spite of this there is a continually increasing use of articulated tippers and it is interesting to consider why this should be so. Keeping to the popular idea about tippers—the long-established one—that of transporting material in connection with building construction, there are two basic types of tipping work. One is "muck ", which includes such things as soil, overburden and rubbish. the other " materials", consisting of sand, ballast, road-making materials and so on. There is a world of difference between the two. Tippers engaged on muck shifting will almost always be ,getting their loads from sites, working in confined spaces and rarely with anything solid under their wheels. Few tipper operators would consider using an artic for this sort of work. But in the case of materials the position is quite different. Here the vehicles will be engaged on carting sand, ballast and the like from a pit to the construction site and it is possible that the vehicle will have a decent surface to run on at both ends. One reason for this is that contracting work is now much more organized, and on large sites there is generally a central stockpile of materials to which vehicles will deliver over at least partly-made-up roads.
Many tipper operators also engage in the operation of sand and gravel pits and in site clearance and so on, including digging and excavating. For these, machinery often has to be moved, but a vehicle would not be used full time on this work. So it is
logical to turn to articulation. A tipper operator who has done this is Geo. Cross and Co. Ltd., of Southall, Middlesex, who recently bought a new A.E.C. Mercury tractive unit and two Dyson semi-trailers. One of the semi-trailers is a low-loader machinery carrier, the other a twinoscillating-axle unit with a 10-cu.-yd. body by Jack Rigby Motors and Pilot tipping gear. The dropframe unit is used for transporting excavators, loaders and diggers, and when this is not being used the Mercury is used with the tipper on general work. This system has been found to be most satisfactory, although it is necessary to be careful in picking sites on which the artic tipper can be used. It should be said that an attic is not necessarily any worse on rough ground than a single-drive six-wheeler, with which a single axle semi-trailer can be compared on load-carrying capacity. It can, in fact, be better if the design is such that as much load as possible is put on the tractive unit rear axle.
Flexibility Flexibility is, of course, the articulated vehicle's main advantage. And it is not only on building and construction work that tippers are used. For many years tipping vehicles have been used for bulk transport of coal, coke, scrap metal and so on, and more recently there has been a trend towards the use of bulk tippers for grains, animal feeding stuffs and other farming produce. Following the trend in general road haulage towards articulation, vehicles used on these classes of transport are now very often artics.
In many cases, articulated tippers give far more benefits than their counterparts on general haulage. A typical example of this is in the case of scrap _metal, where an empty semi-trailer can be left at a firm's premises for loading (this may be a slow process) and the full semitrailer picked up again later. In this way the semi-trailers also act as storage for the waste metal, but this system cuts out the idle time there would be if a vehicle had to be loaded from a scrap pile.
Semi-trailer tippers are also very cornE24 monly used for transporting coal and coke, and here again extremely economic vehicle utilization can be obtained. A great deal of time can be wasted in bulk haulage through the place of delivery not being ready to take the load and the vehicle having to wait. One of the best examples I have heard on the saving of time, using attic tippers, is the transport of coal and steel between Birmingham and South Wales by Barr Common Trading Co. for Chas. B. Pugh This operator employs a number of tipping semi-trailers built by Welford Engineering (Oldbury) Ltd., using B.T.C. Four-in-Line running gear and 30-cu.-yd. all-steel bodies. The chassis frame, tipping gear and body are all produced by Welford and the vehicles are used to transport scrap metal from the Birmingham area to SouthWales and return with bulk coke from the steelworks' coke ovens. By using semi-trailers it is possible to organize that the vehicles are
always running laden and there are no delays for loading and unloading. The tractive unit takes. a loaded semi-trailer (with scrap) to the steelworks, where lt is left on a park ready for unloading and returns with a previously loaded unit (with coke). Pugh keeps a shunting tractive unit at the steelworks and when the time comes for the steel to be unloaded this is used to move the semi-trailers to the unloading point, to take the empty unit for loading with coke and finally to return the coke-laden unit to the park • ready for picking up by a semi-trailer for its next return run.
Return Run Each Day Using this system it has been possible to work a return run each day, which would have been impossible if there had been delays for loading and unloading, and to illustrate the amount of work that can be done the outfits are running about 75,000 miles a year, which is quite high for this type of work and, of course, all the time the vehicles are loaded.
The other field in which articulated tippers are used a great deal is bulk haulage of grains and powders. Sometimes tipping is the sole means of discharging the load,' but this is not so common as using tipping as the secondary unloading feature. Methods of discharging include blowing and the use of augers,_ and a usual practice is to tip the body as the load reduces to bring the contents to the discharge units.