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Refurbishment isn't just a thing of the past.
It's alive in the 90's and gaining converts.
Vehicle and body refurbishment? Wasn't that something the nationalised bus companies used to get up to in the old days when they all had enormous central workshops? Yes it was. But anyone who thinks the practice died out when the last ex-National Bus Company workshop was turned into a superstore is wrong.
Modern truck and van fleet operators have more rebuilt vehicles in service than a casual observer might realise. And the signs are that refurbishment, far from dying out, is likely to become more common in the future.
Operators renovate old vehicles instead of buying new for reasons that are almost as varied as their types of vehicle operation. But it is common to find changes in length and weight limits, a need to smooth out capital expenditure peaks, or big changes in customer demand among the root causes given.
P&O Ferrymasters is one of the UK's biggest international operators of at-tics with 184 tractive units and around 2,000 semi-trailers (200 more on order). It would be hard to find a workshop anywhere that is more experienced in semi-trailer refurbishments than the one at Ferrymasters' Warrington depot. The company's Ipswich-based engineering director, Barry Gill, explains that trailers like his have a tougher life than those in typical general-haulage trailers. "The bodies and paintwork on Ro-Ro trailers, particularly those which frequently (TOW the North Sea, deteriorate quickly. And the multi-function use of our trailers takes its toll too. A Ferrymaster's trailer might easily be pulled by as many as 50 different tractors in a year."
BETTER VALUE
Towards the end of last year, Gill decided to change Ferrymasters' refurbishment policy to get better value for money and to be better able to satisfy rocketing demand from the company's customers for I3.6-metre trailers. He says the cost of major refurbishment (£9,000 for a tilt and £11,000 for a curtain sider) as a percentage of the cost of a new 13.6m trailer (about £20,000) had become "unacceptably high".
Furthermore, its current four-year refurbishment cycle failed to produce 13.6m trailers fast enough to keep pace with demand. The average age of the fleet had come down to the point where the balance between four and eight-year refurbishments had been lost. Gill proposed that the Warrington workshop should concentrate on stretching 12.2 and 12.6 metre trailers, regardless of when they went into service, to 13.6 metres.
The new policy started in January. By 1996 every tii-axle trailer in the Ferrymasters fleet will be at or near the new maximum length. Barry Gill puts the average cost of this refurbishment at £5,750 per trailer, or less than 30% of the cost of buying a new 13.6m trailer.
This has saved Ferrymasters 42.13 million. Gill reckons the alternative would have been to buy 150 new trailers. It still leaves the Warrington workshop with enough capacity to take in trailer-refurbishment work from outside companies. Gill expects to find a growing number of customers as more operators decide to make the most of the 13.6m limit.
The fundamental reason why trailers are more likely to be refurbished than tractive units or lighter trucks and vans is that they are generally kept running for much longer. No 7.5-tonner, for example, would ever have a planned life of 15 years, would it? It would with United Parcel Service.
The world's largest parcel-delivery company, with a fleet of road vehicles totalling about 95,000, has never been one to follow the crowd. It designs and builds its own delivery vans in the US, largely because it could not find an offthe-shelf model to last as long as it wanted20 years.
Paul Morris, automotive director for the UPS "Europe region" (which encompasses Africa and the Middle East, oddly enough) recalls how the company had to set its vehiclelife sights a bit lower when it started to develop its business on this side of the Atlantic.
The first vans UPS put on the road in Germany had a UPS-designed aluminium body, designated P60 because of its 600ft3 (17m3) load volume, grafted on to the front section of a Mercedes-Benz 508D chassis-cab by German bodybuilders such as Kassbohrer, Spiers and FFG.
UPS expected these vans to last 15 years under relatively arduous European operating conditions. But about three years ago, after they had been in service for "only" 10, the steel Mercedes cabs started to rust.
Any other operator would have sold the 10-year-old vans and replace them with new ones. Not UPS. The 508Ds were sent to Kassbohrer for refurbishment. This entailed cutting off the Mercedes cab and replacing it with the standard P60. aluminium UPS cab.
The P60 is reminiscent of British parcel vans of the 1960s, such as the Comnier WalkThru, though the cab is if anything even more utilitarian. You won't hear complaints about it from UPS drivers or maintenance staff, however. This vehicle is designed uncompromisingly for the job it does; it is supremely easy to maintain and it has astonishing durability Monis says the 120 508Ds refurbished and converted to full-blown P60s by Kassbohrer will be working for another 10 years from the dates they went back on the road. So UPS will be getting a 20-year life from some vehicles in its European operation after all. Morris has no doubt that it was cost-effective to have these vans refurbished. He says each refurbishment cost about DM 20,000 (about £8,000) compared with about DM 52,000 (about £21,000) for a comparable new off-the-shelf vehicle, such as the 508D.
BEST EXAMPLES
One of the best examples of how body refurbishment can keep older vehicles looking smart is set by Lynx, NFC's parcels division. With a fleet of 1,300 vehicles and 700 trailers, Lynx is not in the UPS league. The Lynx policy is to replace tractive units every three years. But rigid, box-bodied trucks with gross weights from 7.5 to 10 tonnes are kept in service for up to nine years.
Keith Marriott, manager of the Lynx vehicle bodyshop at Leyland, Lancashire, says the rigids get a "mid-life re-paint and refurbishment after about five years." This year, 120 F-registered trucks are scheduled to go to Leyland for this work. Marriott says that each job takes about 45-50 man hours with the vehicle in the workshop for five days.
All the refurbishment work is done without taking the body off its chassis, though the 13 workshop staff are quite capable of building bodies. They developed this skill in 1987 when Lynx was formed by the amalgamation of NFC's three former parcels operations.
There were 1,600 trailers in the combined fleet, with an average age of 11. The massive refurbishment programme run by the Leyland workshop at that time involved reclaiming the best of the trailers' running gear and building new bodies on most of them. David Mitchell, Lynx national fleet services manager, reckons that buying new trailers, the only alternative way of bringing the average age of his trailer fleet down to a reasonable level, would have cost about 1:4 million more over three years.
Like Ferrymasters with its Warrington workshop, Lynx is using its refurbishment expertise to earn revenue as well as cut capital costs. The Leyland workshop builds and renovates bodies for other operators, not all from the NFC group and not all parcel-delivery bodies. One of the latest refurbishment contracts it has won is for petrol tankers run by NFC's Tankfreight division for Gulf, Who knows? Perhaps double-deck buses could be next on the list.