AT THE HEART OF THE ROAD TRANSPORT INDUSTRY.

Call our Sales Team on 0208 912 2120

Prepare to meet the Inspector

9th April 1971, Page 54
9th April 1971
Page 54
Page 55
Page 54, 9th April 1971 — Prepare to meet the Inspector
Close
Noticed an error?
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.

Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

by lain Sherriff, MITA THE RENEWAL of an operator's licence will not be automatic. When the current licence expires operators will be required to make application for a new licence and as such they will be treated as new applicants. Applications will be published in "Applications and Decisions", they will be open to objection and the applicant may be called to public inquiry.

Under the transitional provisions it was all WO easy to obtain an operator's licence. Applications were not published, there was no right of objection. Provided the Licensing Authority had no concrete evidence to the contrary, he accepted that each transitional applicant was a fit and proper person, that he had made adequate arrangements for maintenance and that his facilities were in themselves adequate. The next application will attract more attention from the LA and the statutory objectors.

Inspections Relatively few applicants during the transitional period were visited by members of the staff of the area mechanical engineer with a view to inspecting their premises. Before the next application is considered by the LA everyone's premises will be inspected. With this in mind, I recently discussed the question of adequate facilities and arrangements with a senior area mechanical engineer of the Department of the Environment. What did his staff look for? What equipment did they expect to find? Did they find record systems even remotely adequate? Could all operators reach the required standards? These were some of the questions I put to him.

"It matters little that an operator has a well-appointed garage and a perfect system for keeping records, this is merely paying lip service to the Act if the vehicles themselves are not being serviced," said the senior area mechanical engineer. "The Act sets out to ensure that vehicles which are being operated on the highway are fit and serviceable. However, immediately we suspect that the vehicles are being underserviced then a visit to the operator's premises is automatic," he added.

I had suspected that the most vulnerable operators were those operating one or two vehicles; apparently, this is not the case. In fact, I learned that the oneor two-vehicle man treats his vehicles as he would his own private car. Frequently, the owner lies on his back on a piece of carpet or boarding under the vehicles spending five or six hours each week on their maintenance.

While in terms of equipment this could be looked upon as being totally inadequate by the purists, the fact that the vehicles are being maintained to a high standard despite the lack of equipment is sufficient in itself to satisfy the area mechanical engineer's staff and the Transport Act 1968.

When the operator graduates to three to four vehicles he apparently realizes that the Saturday afternoon/Sunday morning session is inadequate and he elects to have the vehicles maintained at outside garages. In such circumstances the service appears to be satisfactory because even at this stage the owner still has time to inspect the vehicles after they have been returned from the garage.

The most dangerous situation is where an operator has five or more vehicles but has not yet reached the 10to 15-vehicle mark. He has to decide whether he should continue to farm out the servicing or employ a mechanic and install equipment.

According to the senior area mechanical engineer these are the people whose vehicles are underserviced and who attract attention. These are the operators he is most likely to visit and who may very well find themselves losing a business which they have built through many years of toil, and sweat.

Tidiness It has long been accepted in industry that a tidy worker is a good worker and the DoE examiners apply this yardstick to operators. However, they do not expect to find palatial premises with well scrubbed floors, tiled walls and highly polished equipment.

The first thing an inspector would look for is a means of cleaning the underside of the vehicle—not necessarily a steam cleaner for each operator because it is readily accepted that such equipment is expensive and may stand idle for many months. However, a cleaner can well be used on a co-operative basis by half a dozen small men purchasing one piece of equipment and using it to a mutually agreed programme each month. Its use ensures that the underside of the vehicle is clean, and cleanliness exposes defects and encourages the man with the spanners to do his repair job more thoroughly than he normally would when faced with an underside which is caked in clay, mud, grease and filth. So that where possible steam-cleaning facilities and detergent will go a long way towards showing the vehicle examiner that the servicing programme is off to a good start.

As I understand it, the examiners will at least expect the vehicle to be inspected and maintained under cover and while a pit may not be considered essential for the one-vehicle operator, a man who has more than, say, four vehicles would be expected to have a pit in his premises.

A properly designed and equipped pit will save a great deal of time. However, even when a pit is used the DoE men estimate that a vehicle will be off the road for inspection and maintenance for at least half a day each week. If Saturday and Sunday are to be the only maintenance days, then since there are only four maintenance periods in that time more than four vehicles will call for more than one pit.

A hole in the ground is not a pit and the excavation of something resembling a Second World War slit trench is unlikely to impress an examiner!

Ideally, pits should be long enough to take the longest vehicle with enough space to spare to allow the mechanic to enter or leave the pit at both ends; this may not always be possible but ease of access at one end is essential. It should be located close to the spot where the mechanic's hand-tools are available.

Plenty of light is not only desirable but essential, and angled lights on the pit walls which diffuse light onto the underside of the vehicle provide almost ideal working conditions. Robustly built inspection lamps on a long trailing cable provide additional on-the-spot illumination, and these are considered to be essential.

Pit illumination is one of the more important features of vehicle inspection and repair, and, of course, lighting should be flameproof.

The pit should be adequately drained and seated on a solid floor which should at all .times be kept free of grease and oil. This can be easily achieved by spreading powdered detergent on the floor each evening at the end of the day's work.

With some ingenuity and using direct labour such a pit will cost less than £200 and if broken down into an hourly rate per vehicle over the life of five vehicles the cost is infinitesimal. It will last much longer than the vehicles.

Not all engineers agree with automatic chassis lubrication systems and many elect to use grease. Among the small fleet operators automatic chassis lubrication is still considered to be a luxury—desirable it may be but a luxury it is, nevertheless.

The senior area mechanical engineer suggested that if automatic lubrication was not to be used then power greasing was the only other acceptable method. This would mean the installation of a small trolley compressor capable of operating at 120 psi and equipment at an approximate cost of £80. And again taken over the life of five vehicles the hourly cost would, as in the case of pit, be infinitesimal.

He said that most mechanics or vehicle owners are very well equipped with hand-tools which they have collected over the years but there does seem to be some reluctance to buy garage equipment. This appears to be particularly so in the case of jacks and axle stands and the like.

Nothing horrifies the examiner more than to find a vehicle in a workshop resting on a bottle-jack on one side and a few railway sleepers on the other with both sets of rear wheels removed. Such a picture presents an unsafe working situation and in these circumstances it is considered that a mechanic is less likely to be as meticulous as he would be if proper equipment was in use.

Trolley -jack A trolley-jack with an 8-ton lifting capacity will cost £83 and axle stands capable of lifting 8 tons each will cost £13.70. This combined cost written off over the life of five vehicles will be less than .15p per hour or less than one-tenth of an old penny.

Under-vehicle cleaning equipment, well-lit pits, power greasing, trolley-jacks and axle stands: this is the kind of equipment which the DoE examiner will look upon as being adequate. Installation of equipment is irrelevant unless it is being used regularly and it is equally important that it should be seen to he used. Vehicles which are found to be fit in service are clear evidence that the equipment is in use.

An operator may opt out of the actual servicing, but he cannot, however, abdicate his responsibility for maintaining records.

If a vehicle examiner visits an operator's premises where there is a wall chart, obviously up to date, showing which vehicles are in for service on that day and when the others will be due to go for service, the examiner will undoubtedly be impressed. He will not necessarily be impressed to the point where he will neglect his duty to ensure that the service is being carried out. but if he sees that the wall chart is in use and is not merely a decoration then he will be part of the way to being satisfied that the operator is taking every precaution to ensure that the vehicles are being properly serviced.

Wall charts Wall charts should neither be complicated nor fragile. They must be easy to read and understand and be robust enough to withstand the handling to which they will be subjected. Many such pieces of equipment are readily available on the market and operators should find little difficulty in obtaining one to suit their particular requirements.

While a wall chart or some similar system is essential for pre-planning the Act specifically requires operators to keep records of servicing. Such records have to be retained for 15 months and they should be entirely comprehensive.

Record cards should identify the vehicle, state the date and mileage at which it was serviced, what class of service was carried out, what defects were discovered and what action was taken to rectify these defects. The service card should ideally show the length of time spent on the service and on the repair and it shoUld detail what replacement parts were fitted during the service or repair.

The senior area mechanical engineer asked me to stress particularly the point that operators should be able to produce clean, comprehensive records at any moment, He emphasized that while it was the condition of the vehicle which mattered at the end of the day, a well-kept record system would go a long way to satisfying his staff that at least the operator was trying to conform. • It seems then that those most likely to fall down on a licence application are those operators who continue to try to service their vehicles on shoestring facilities after the fleet size has passed the four-vehicle mark. The others are those at the other end of the scale who have installed more than adequate facilities but because of the complex nature of their operations are unable to implement an adequate maintenance system which is compatible to both traffic and maintenance requirements.

From evidence already gathered there is no doubt that inadequate maintenance is the greatest single factor in operators losing their margins, or even worse in losing operating vehicles from their fleets. Against the loss of one's business the cost of installation of adequate equipment and the operation of a scheme is fractional.

Workshops It seems that when the four-vehicle mark is passed, then a small, not elaborate but functional workshop at a cost of around £500 becomes essential. The alternative to this is to pass the work to a well-appointed garage Which specializes in a particular make of commercial vehicle and which is not tempted away to the more lucrative private car repairs. One pit and one mechanic for every 10 vehicles and a weekly servicing programme would seem to be reasonable; obviously, the mechanic should be properly trained.

To ensure that vehicles are well maintained requirements fall under five headings: Cleaning, lighting, power, personnel and records.

The future of the operator's licence depends on how well his vehicles are kept and how well they kept depends on the use the operator makes of the more than adequate garage equipment which is available today.

Tags

Organisations: Licensing Authority

comments powered by Disqus