THE STEEL REAL DEAL
IT’S THE REAL DEAL WHEN IT COMES TO STRONGER, better-looking, longer-lasting steel for truck and trailer tipper bodies. Hundreds of Kiwi transport operators have made that pretty clear over the past eight and a bit years.
They’ve decided that Swedish-made Hardox high-strength steel is the right thing for their truck and trailer bodies – and they’ve put their money where their opinion is: They’ve commissioned 4000 of ‘em since late 2012.
The 4000th Hardox body was finished late last year – built by Transport & General Engineering (T&G), under its Transport Trailers brand. That the milestone was achieved by T&G is appropriate – since it is New Zealand’s single biggest Hardox body manufacturer. Fitting too, that it was made for Fulton Hogan – a company that T&G has built 58 Hardox bins for.
To say that the Swedish Steel-manufactured Hardox has revolutionised NZ’s steel truck and trailer tipper body market is no exaggeration – as is graphically demonstrated by T&G’s experience.
In early 2013 it completed two of NZ’s first Hardox bodies – a truck and trailer unit for Rooney Earthmoving in Waimate.
Since then it has made over 500 bodies out of Hardox. And now, when it comes to steel bins, it simply doesn’t care to use anything but Hardox.
T&G director Greg Cornes confirms that the introduction of Hardox has been “absolutely amazing for our business…”
The high-strength steel “lends itself perfectly to our tipping industry – not all facets of it, but especially the construction and roading side….very much so.
“Because it gives those sorts of clients more versatility with what they can cart. See, one day they could be carting sand, the next day they could be carting demolition materials.
“And in the past, say if we were building a Bis 80 rock bin, we’d be looking at building it with 10mm floors and eight millimetre sides… Well we can build a relatively heavy-duty (Hardox) rock bin with six mill floors and four mill sides – so there’s a huge weight saving to start with.
“But the biggest benefit that I’ve seen with it is in the past we’ve used wear plates to make these heavier duty bins. But most wear plates, like for roading type products, they do work hard, but they don’t like being formed and they don’t like being welded. Whereas Hardox has got a high resistance to work hardening and it’s extremely easy to weld and also it’s quite formable.”
Hardox has actually been around in Sweden for over 46 years, but only made it to NZ in late 2012, when Wellington-based Real Steel – a supplier of steel wear parts for quarrying and mining industry machinery and equipment – noticed that there was a well-established market in Europe for tipper bins made of Hardox….
Which had been launched by Swedish Steel in 1974 as “the bendable wear plate” – the first wear plate in the world, it said, “to combine both hardness and toughness and also work well as construction steel.”
The Kiwi company wasn’t really “selling anything to truck (or trailer) body builders at that time,” says managing director Luke Mathieson.
But it could see the potential of the truck and trailer market simply because some of its mining and quarrying customers “also had trucks – and we could see the issues that they were having with their truck bodies.
“And so I guess we had a bit of confidence that the end users would have some demand for the product.”
So it decided to introduce Hardox here – promoting it as a lighter, tougher, longer-lasting alternative to mild steel for tipper bodies.
There was a catch: As Mathieson explains, to get the full advantage of the benefits of Hardox, a much bigger steel press brake than any in NZ at that time had to be bought and set up at Real Steel’s Upper Hutt HQ – to bend and shape the bodies.
Thus, the key to Hardox’s introduction in late 2012 was the commissioning of Real Steel’s 1000/8200 press brake, with a 1000-tonne force rating and the capability to handle up to 8.2metre-long plates.
The concept was (and still is) for Real Steel’s designers to work with trailermakers to optimise the benefits of Hardox – at least halving the number of separate components needed for a truck or
trailer body….down to a prefabricated kitset comprising just four pieces of steel.
As Mathieson said at the time: “We’re taking things to another level – and really developing what you can do with this steel.”
T&G’s first Hardox bodies, for instance – a 6m trailer body and 4.8m truck bin – saw each body side, complete with a multi-bend, rolled top coaming rail, a smooth, flat main side panel and a skirt, formed from a single sheet of Hardox.
As Mathieson pointed out: “You know, historically you were lucky to do the floor in one piece – it was usually done in three or four pieces and each side in three or four pieces, with a separate coaming rail on top. And then your headboard and your tailgate.”
Making the formed sides possible, he explained, was “a mixture of the capacity of our machine and the tooling that we’ve got and the properties of the steel. You know, with a lesser grade steel – a weaker steel – you wouldn’t achieve that profile. It would just collapse in on itself. It’s only achievable in Hardox.”
Benefits, he added, included the shorter fabrication time, the “dead-straight” bends, the reduced welding and the clincher: “The steel itself is five times stronger than mild steel….”
Looking back now, Mathieson says that investing in the huge press brake “was a big step to make” – but it has paid off: The success of Hardox in the NZ tipper body market has exceeded expectations.
To the extent that Real Steel has since added two smaller press brakes – a 630t/6.2m machine “that’s good for the truck bodies” and a smaller one for componentry.
Hardox wasn’t an instant hit with the truck and trailer body manufacturers, Mathieson points out: “Those first couple of years…..the uptake was slow. But then it grew strongly from there.”
As expected, “it was end user driven, I guess. Because the end users were prepared to pay a little bit extra for something that was going to give them a lot better performance.”
Mathieson concedes that a Hardox body costs more than a mild steel alternative – but reckons that, “weighing up the benefits Hardox provides, it offers excellent value and lower cost of ownership.”
And adds: “When you think about a tipper body, the price of the steel is only one component of building it. There’s obviously a lot of labour, there’s hydraulics, there’s paint, electrical – all those components come into it.
“So, a big push from the outset for us was to try and reduce the labour component – because that offset the steel price to a certain point.
“So, having the one piece for the integrated coaming rail…. number one, it was functional – because any weld on the high strength steel is always going to be the weak point. So, it actually created a stronger body because there were less welds.
“Number two, the aesthetics. Much cleaner lines. And number
three, the fabrication time was greatly reduced, because there’s less components to work with.
“So, you start adding all those things up, and then there’s some good reasons there to invest the extra in a Hardox body.
“And that doesn’t even really take into account tare weight – and the cost of ownership.” Apart from being five times stronger than mild steel, Hardox typically delivers around a 30% weight saving.
Adds Mathieson: “But probably what we’ve seen over the years is guys aren’t typically chasing every last bit of tare weight with a Hardox body: They’re ending up with a very acceptable weight, but they’re ending up with a very versatile bin that can do demolition, or it can do big rock one minute – and then it can do gravel the next. And it’s going to stand the test of time and still look good a few years down the track.”
Back when Real Steel was introducing Hardox, Mathieson said he expected the high-strength steel bodies would last 10 to 15 years, maybe longer. Does he still believe that will be the case?
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, it really depends on what they’re doing and how much of it they’re doing. But certainly, I think it wasn’t unusual for a mild steel body to at least wear out the floor and need a floor replacement within the life of the truck. I would say that’s pretty unusual with a Hardox body.”
If he sounds a wee bit cautious, it’s probably only because “there’s been some cases where people think, because they’re getting a Hardox body, it’s rock-solid and can handle anything that they throw at it. Yet they’ll only be building it out of like 3mm, or something like that.”
They’d risk getting “some dings” and might have to “spend a bit on R&M now and then. But typically, the life of the deck will at least match the life of the truck....or longer.”
Mathieson adds: “That kind of stuff happens less and less these days. Because the product’s been around for so long now, and there’s a lot of it out there, everybody’s got a pretty good idea” of how to spec it and use it correctly.
Greg Cornes says that now, not only are all of T&G’s steel bins made of Hardox…. the tough Swedish Steel is also used for 95% of each body: “So, we use Hardox in the wear plates, the runners, side skirts, the top rails, the front headboard, hoist boxes…… It’s
only the add-on componentry, like trips and door closers and
hinges and stuff (that aren’t Hardox).” Whereas “historically you would have had to have two welds for the top rail, a weld for the floor, a weld for your side skirt, it’s probably halved the amount of welding required….and the less welds, the stronger it’s going to be.”
A Hardox bin is, he says, three times stronger than one that’s made out of mild steel.
Lifetime-wise, bins built out of mild steel before Hardox was available, were “effectively a five to 10-year proposition….. And what we’re seeing is these (Hardox) bins will last far longer….they’ll potentially outlast some of the trucks we put them on, that’s for sure.”
And there’s another benefit – specifically from the Hardox floors, Cornes says. That is, they “release the product easier: They shine up once they’ve had a lot of use, instead of getting all gouged up and dented… If they’re spreading and tipping aggregates and stuff it just slides out extremely easily.”
Cornes says that T&G has fully embraced Hardox – in part because of “the alignment of values between Swedish Steel, Real Steel and T&G: We all work off very similar values – and that is making the best product we possibly can, and providing our clients not only with quality, but with value.”
Hardox, he says, has “been extremely
important for us as a business. It’s given us a whole new product line. Like I said, we don’t build a mild steel bin any more, we only use the Hardox product in our bins.”
Prior to Hardox, “we built very few steel bins…it wasn’t a big part of our business at all. We didn’t feel that we were providing a quality product for our clients and therefore we were not giving any added value.
“But that’s the difference Hardox has made – being able to build equipment that actually really adds value.
“We pride ourselves on building clients a quality product that, for one – they’re going to get a good life out of it, and when they do sell it, it’s good for another, second life – which means, historically our gear’s had good resale value.
“And we don’t want to lose that. We want our clients to be confident that in eight to 10 years’ time, when they’re trading up or moving that gear on, they’ve got something that’s saleable, has a good resale and it’s going to have a good second life with someone else.”
That philosophy has seen T&G intentionally put no emphasis on the weight saving possibilities of Hardox….in favour of using its strength and toughness “to give our clients longterm reliability.”
It’s the same rationale, by the way, that T&G has applied in introducing in recent years another Swedish Steel product, Strenx 700, for its trailer chassis: “We’ve done that not to reduce weight but to increase the design life of the trailers and give them better torsional rigidity and stability.”
T&G has settled on a standard build for its Hardox bodies:
“You can go thinner….but what we want to do is give our clients longterm reliability and we know building them with a 6mm floor and 4mm sides, they’re going to get that longevity out of them.
“They might carry a touch more weight, but they can put a wide range of products in it – like from sand, up to 500 mill diameter rock and stuff….sometimes a bit heavier.”
Along with that versatility, he adds, clients get good-looking gear: “I know it’s only an aesthetics thing, but you look at steel bins of old that drive down the road – all the sides would be all dented and bulged out…. We don’t see this with Hardox bins.”
Specced correctly for their applications, Hardox users “should see no damage to them at all.”
There have, he says, “been issues in the industry where people have probably under-specced the product and gone and carted basalt or something like that…. and so they’ve ended up with a few dents and stuff. But as a whole the structural integrity of the bins is fine.”
T&G is one of five NZ manufacturers accredited with Swedish Steel’s Hardox In My Body quality control certification – several of them outside the road transport industry.
And, says Cornes, since starting building Hardox bodies, there’s been continuous development: “We’re working with Real Steel all the time on design and product improvement and the way we can make things better.”
Mathieson, in fact, points to T&G as a great example of a manufacturer Real Steel works with “very closely” on “constantly innovating their designs. The Hardox bins that they’re building now are just light years away from when they first started.”
Included in T&G’s 500 Hardox bodies have been some HPMV units – plus a number for special applications: “We have built some very heavy-duty ones, which would be an eight mill floor and six mill sides. At that thickness you could cart almost anything and be impervious to damage almost….
“And we’re building one at the moment for a client in the
South Island that’s actually got 10mm floors and 8mm sides. Yeah, so that’s going to be around in about five centuries’ time, I reckon!” T&D