DHL takes first Teardrop drawbar for NHS contract
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Don-Bur’s aerodynamic body has evolved with the launch of a wagon and drag version of the Teardrop
CM EXCLUSIVE
By David Wilcox THE EVOLUTION of Don-Bur’s Teardrop body design has taken another step forward with the delivery of the irst drawbar outit to feature the low-drag bodywork. The customer, unsurprisingly, is DHL, an avowed fan of the Teardrop. DHL said two years ago that Teardrop bodywork would become its standard for its semi-trailers unless there was a compelling operational reason that rules it out.
The innovative drawbar was spotted earlier this month by CM during a visit to Don-Bur (Bodies & Trailers) factory in Stoke-onTrent. The rig was coming out of the workshops, apparently in the inal stages of preparation before delivery to the customer. It carries the livery of NHS Supply Chain, the company set up in 2006 when DHL won the contract to take over the logistics and the rest of the National Health Service’s supply chain functions. Alfreton, Derbyshire-based NHS Supply Chain is operated by DHL on behalf of the NHS.
The first Teardrop
Don-Bur built the irst Teardrop trailer, a boxvan, in 2007. Then came the curtain-sided version in 2008, followed by a refrigerated trailer variant and boxvan bodywork for rigid truck chassis in 2009. Now Don-Bur has applied the swooping roof proile to an 18.75mlong drawbar combination with boxvan bodywork designed to carry roll-cages. The distinctive rooline remains, albeit punctuated by a metre-long gap between the front and rear portions of the outit, but there are no side-skirts on either the prime-mover or the trailer.
A smooth operator
This means fuel savings must come from the smooth transition from the truck’s cab to its body, plus the curvaceous roof proile that slopes down towards the rear to reduce the size of the negative air pressure area at the rear.
The prime-mover is a DAF CF75.360 18-tonner. Joints in the side-panels of both bodies conirm that they are made from Don-Bur’s Blade material rather than the usual one-piece GRP/ply panels.
Blade is a 7.5mm-thick sandwich panel with a high-density polyethylene (HDPE) foam inner core with 0.5mm-thick galvanised steel skins on both sides.
It is claimed to be both lighter (by about 250kg on a 13.6m-long trailer) and more impact-resistant than a conventional GRP panel. Its modest thickness also creates more internal width. The DAF’s under-slung drawbar coupling is from VBG.
The centre-bogie drawbar trailer has a pair of BPW axles, shod with twinned 265/70 R19.5 tyres. This tyre size offers a good compromise between suficient load capacity and minimal loor height – the latter necessary to offset the low rear aperture height that is a consequence of the Teardrop’s shape. Tyre capacity and axle spacing indicates that the bogie can be plated at up to 18 tonnes, so the whole outit theoretically could work at up to 36 tonnes GTW.
There are Whiting wide-slat shutters at both the front and the back of the trailer, showing the outit is conigured to allow through-loading, avoiding the need to uncouple the trailer to load/unload the prime-mover.
The Ratcliff Palinger columnmounted tail-lift on the prime mover will serve as a bridging plate between the two bodies.
A high-volume rig
The tail-lifts at the rear of both halves of the outit must drop down below deck level in their stowed position so they do not impede access from a loading bank. There is no body demount system, suggesting the outit is designed to operate predominantly as a complete high-volume rig, with only the prime-mover able to operate independently without its trailer.
Don-Bur remains tight-lipped about the Teardrop drawbar, other than to say that it is the irst of a batch ordered by the customer. n