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S peed of unloading was one reason why woodshavings, sawdust, bark

21st February 2002
Page 45
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Page 45, 21st February 2002 — S peed of unloading was one reason why woodshavings, sawdust, bark
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

and waste contractor Edgar F Shepherd bought an 84m3 Doll Combi-Floor moving floor 13.6m triaxle semi-trailer.

Winner of the bulker category in CM s Trailer of the Year zoo,. awards, the CombiFloor can discharge a cargo of wood chips in between eight and co minutes, says transport manager Nigel Shepherd (pictured, left).

"That compares with an hour to an hour-and-a-half if you're carrying them in a curtainsider," he says. "With Combi-Floor, the driver doesn't have to wait to be unloaded. A curtainsider's load will be pushed out using a huge ram, sometimes leading to the trailer suffering damage."

"A self-emptying trailer gives us a big advantage in a highly competitive industry," says his father, Edgar, who set up the company in 1959. Acquired nearly two years ago, the Combi-Floor has been trouble-free, says Nigel. Running on air suspension, it is an ex-demonstrator---theShepherds came across it because they knew Doll's UK agent from earlier business dealings.

"It does everything we require it to, needs very little maintenance and we'll keep it until it wears out," Nigel adds. "We'd certainly think about adding more trailers of that type to our fleet as time goes on."

The floor is made up of aluminium boards, and a moving bulkhead ensures that the entire load is removed.

The cargo is tipped on to a tarpaulin laid on the trailer floor and hooked up to the bottom of the bulkhead. The floor's motion and the weight of the load cause the tarpaulin to pull the bulkhead all the way to the rear of the trailer, pushing out the last speck of sawdust.

Then the driver pushes the bulkhead to the front of the trailer again. It moves freely and its rollers are .quipped with a small brush to Rep the track clean.

There are no obstructions at he trailer's rear corners that night cause the load to dam up Luring discharge.

laised body

be Doll is preferable to a conentional tipping trailer if the drier has to drop his cargo inside a Luilding with a roof low enough ) foul a raised body, Nigel xplains. Anyone attempting to .p up an 84m2 body would worry bout stability and might fear 'tat the load would stick—not sually a difficulty with a movig-floor trailer.

The Shepherds' trailer has ight offside doors which make easier to load return cargo. he bulkhead can be swung pwards to avoid pallets and iake cleaning easier.

Customers can specify nearside oors instead, or no side doors at 1. What they can't do is have ght doors on both sides because tat would compromise the ombi-Floor's strength. Doors on .ther side of the rear section can specified, however.

The firm, which is based at leighington, Darlington, collects iwdust from sawmills and delivis it to chipboard factories, It can also use the Combi-Floor to take away the boards they produce and deliver them to furniture makers.

"You can't do that with a tipper," says Edgar.

Operating at 44 tonnes, covering about 2oo,000krn a year and fitted with BPW disc brakes, the trailer boasts a 26.5-tonne payload. "By contrast, when we used to use a tipper on the same work, we could carry only 18 to 19 tonnes," says Nigel.

The Combi-Floor has an unladen weight of 8.8 tonnes and is equipped with a rollover sheet. If it has a drawback, it is price, having cost the Shepherds more than £40,000.

Edgar did not set up the firm to haul wood products: "We'd gone in for poultry farming and we used wood shavings to bed the poultry down," he says. "In 1963 we started to get them from a company called Packaging industries. As it expanded it produced more shavings than we needed, so I decided to sell the surplus. Our business grew from there, and we're still dealing with them. We still sell animal bedding, although it tends to be seasonal."

The Shepherds—Nigel's brother, Simon, is general manager—no longer keep poultry because of tighter regulations from Brussels. "We pulled out of dairy farming for the same reason," Edgar explains.

The company has 17 Daf and three Scania tractors in service alongside three Daf eight-leggers which transport factory waste— mainly timber offcuts-in skips.

Small off cuts

The Doll carries waste, too, and the moving floor copes with it without jamming. "We're talking about small offcuts rather than large, heavy ones," says Nigel.

"The Scanias are all 4 Series 6x2s at 42ohp and we're averaging about 8mpg with them," he adds. "We get about the same out of our 400hp Daf 85 tractors. They're all 4x2s. "Some of the tractors are on maintenance contracts with local dealers. We maintain the others ourselves and service the trailers too."

Scania dealership Union Trucks has a site two miles away from the Shepherds' base at Twinsburn Farm, while Chatfields, the Daf dealership, is no more than to miles away.

The Shepherds also operate depots at Darlington and nearby Newton Aycliffe.

With 36 staff, the firm runs about too trailers—a mixture of tippers, curtainsiders, and boxes—as well as the CombiFloor. "We use the curtainsiders to carry chipboard, for example," says Nigel.

The box vans arc left at the sawmills for collection once they're stuffed with shavings; a ramp is used to tip them.

They sometimes sit at a mill for several weeks before they are full, so given this pattern of usage, it does not always make sense to buy new trailers. Some of the trucks are bought secondhand too.

But the Shepherds certainly do not allow their expensive CombiFloor to lie idle for days. "It's out working every day," says Nigel.

Although the firm is taking full advantage of being able to operate at 44 tonnes, some of the artics are plated at 36 and 32 tonnes, and they've even got one plated at 24 tonnes. "That's because some woodshavings are very light, just like feathers," says Edgar. "They're used for animal bedding.

"On the lighter loads we can get 9 to 9.5mpg," says Nigel.

"We deliver to farms and we tend to use short trailers—some are only 24ft long—on that work to avoid access problems," says Edgar. Constant disinfection was obligatory during the foot-andmouth outbreak, and the end of movement restrictions should benefit the firm.

Edgar is concerned about the amount of ready-planed imported wood as it reduces the volume of shavings that's available and this affects his business.

"There isn't the vast amount around that there was years ago," he says. "Having said that, we're growing all the time, and we'll do more business this year than we did in 2001."

by Steve Banner


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