toad and workshop
Page 45
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4anpower, maintenance !nd the MoT (31)
by Handyman
It's an easy mistake to set one's hts too high when advertising for ff: for instance, I have repeatedly ked for a fully skilled, all-round heavy isport fitter, only to find none avail e. The fact is that the top men are in ployment, and will only move for ter conditions or higher salary.
therefore today, in our search for staff o will turn out work to meet the icting demands of the MoT, it is :essary to look at the job somewhat erently from the way we did in earlier es when rarely did an official third ty look at the handiwork. What we st do now is: determine what tasks t in man-hours; then tot up the total irs which are available from existing ksI have said in an earlier article, few iliers can afford two separate mainteice exercises. Therefore it's necessary to combine the style and range of inspection shown in the Tester's Manual with one's own maintenance system.
This means that at a time or mileage interval best suited to equipment and operations, the servicing exercise should embody all the Tester's Manual items for inspection, together with the normal drill of oil change, greasing, etc.—this of course must be backed up by the rectification of faults found.
Experience with this style of maintenance is showing that it can also be the right time to fit replacement units, even engine or rear axle. Thus if the maintenance exercise can be married in this fashion, the need for a one-, twoor three-year strip-down can be removed. This is worth while when one considers that the major overhaul can cause anything between one and six weeks' loss of use if the spares situation is bad. Therefore if the full servicing exercise once per month with an inspection to the MoT standard takes even two days per vehicle on occasions, an overall saving is still made—in any case the increased depth of inspection and rectification will remove many of the earlier, betweenperiod stoppages. So the first task is to assess the servicing requirements of the fleet in hours of work, including an inspection based upon the Tester's Manual, plus an allowance for unscheduled work or anticipated unit change.
I now find that taking in all the vehicles of a general haulage fleet, I use on average 22 man-hours per vehicle per month to cover the requirements of normal servicing, inspection and rectification to the MoT standard, plus an allowance of two hours to store up and use to cover unscheduled work or unit change. With semi-trailers, including both single and double axle, an average time to keep them fully serviceable is around 13 man-hours per trailer per month.
On this basis it is possible to work out with reasonable accuracy the total man-hour requirements for a fleet of vehicles and trailers on general haulage, then we can take a serious look at the varying degrees of skill which are required.