Randall Reports

He's not really this old

The motivation for requiring certification of draw beams and drawbars came from a spate of fatal accidents involving heavy motor vehicles where the drawbars or beams had worn out and the heavy trailer had parted company with the truck. The operators knew when it was time to replace a drawbar or beam because it was then in two pieces

Today is vastly different. Certification costs are in the region of $250-$450 bearing in mind that this certification includes additional components which weren’t around 22 years ago. In real terms certification costs are probable only 25% of what there were then. NZ Transport agency now set the bar.

Do I think things have gone backwards—absolutely?

22 years ago, from a design point of view, things were pretty dreadful—there were some abhorrent designs. A four axle stock trailer with a 100 x 75 rhs pole (had been upgraded from 75 x 75 rhs after it had broken and the trailer had hit the Awatiri. Most drawbeam required upgrading but because we designed to fatigue criteria and as weld has a much lower fatigue allowance than parent metal, the upgraded drawbeam were reminiscent of battleships. Got a lot of ribbing, some good natured, some not so good. After a period of time 5 to 10 years later I thought overall the standard of design and manufacture had improved significantly. Good robust designs made by manufacturers who knew what they were about.

What’s happened now is that we have a whole new generation of designer’s certifiers and regulators. The regulators have added a lot more complexity to the compliance regime in the name of consistency. Many of the new designers have little practical experience about why things are the way they are and rely heavily on the regulators for guidance! They challenge the old heads, saying in not so many words that we are stupid, not realizing that the old heads know full well that this is a numbers game—you can never eliminate the possibility of things going wrong but you can as sure as hell reduce the odds!

The benefit of employing a specialist engineer within your business is, I guess, confidentiality as well as you the business owner or manager being able to call the shots. The dis-benefit is that the cost of employing someone is usually 2.5 to three times their pay (divide that by the number of hours that they are actually doing the job they were paid to do) – they can get up and leave any time. Pay that experienced designer say 80k PA ($40/hr) , say they do that type of work 65% of the time that they work for you equals a real productive cost of $185/hr.

The benefit of employing us is that our fee rates range from $90 to $175 per hour, we have around 250,000 man hours of data based information on tap, we have a range of skilled individuals to call on, we are totally confidential, have been around for 22 years and intend to be around for much longer

Bearing in mind the above, Randall and Associates Ltd would like to offer a helping hand, by way of fixed fee service contract, to all good operators, manufacturers and suppliers on a national basis which recognizes your excellent standing in the community. We would undertake the following services on a national basis

• “Design and certification” and or “design and issue of statements of design compliance” covering all aspects of heavy vehicle manufacture or modification
• Sales drawings, promotional drawings, concept sketches
• Provision of standard designs specification either on our letter heads or yours

The benefits to you of a fixed fee contract are

• You just pick the phone up and ask for something to be done—you do not have to worry about cost,
• Better staff utilization,
• National coverage, national consistency for design and specification,
• Reduced compliance and design hassle (one organization to work with).

The benefits to us:

• Better use of our staff and expertise,
• Better use of our data based knowledge,
• Better way for us of dividing up the work day.

Call to action—contact Nigel to find out more

Brakes used to simply stop a vehicle, they are now an important component of an active safety system. Does the new Brake Rule go too far too soon, when in NZ, from what I have read and seen, the major problem is do the brakes work at all?

Trucks are driven fundamentally different to cars, in that that they are almost never driven on their brakes - almost always coasting to a stop, and only being applied in an emergency situation or final stopping. Powerful electromagnetic, or hydraulic, or less common now, exhaust brakes, provide the majority of the retardation required for a heavy motor vehicle (hmv).

The new brake rule was fully implemented on the 1st July 2008 - basically the idea of the rule is that a hmv individually or in combination must be able to stop efficiently whether empty or fully laden. The rule has no grandfather rights, meaning ALL hmv’s modified now must comply with this requirement.

Things such as wheel base alterations will require certification to the brake rule as the amount of weight transferred to the vehicle’s front axle will change under stopping. The difficulty is that in order to achieve certification to the rule, almost all vehicles (if not all) will require either load sensing brakes or ABS - meaning a considerable additional cost when modifying a vehicle. The same will also apply for the fitting of a drawbeam if trailer brake gear does not come as part of the truck package.

From what I have seen, from the 1st Jully the fitment of new drawbeams to old trucks has stopped, so also has wheelbase alteration or axle configuration alterations.

If you are going to purchase a second-hand truck, REALLY IMPORTANT - select a vehicle which is the closest fit to the vehicle that you need - don’t expect, as of right, to be able to alter the vehicle afterwards.

If you plan to modify a truck for whatever reason, VERIFY FIRST that the brakes are able to be set up to comply with requirements. I do not know whether it is possible to fit ABS brakes to all makes & models - I have heard figures of 5k for ABS truck kits, then there is brake relining & certification on top of that.

From our point of view, the cost of certifying a brake modification for a new vehicle with information from the manufacturer is $750 - for a second-hand vehicle, our best estimate is $1500. Based on workflow prior to July 1st, we would have anticipated a couple of wheelbase alterations to old trucks & a few drawbeams fitted to second-hand Japanese imports. Since this date, we have seen several new vehicles, but no inservice vehicles.

What does this all mean? I suspect it means the end of truck modifications as we used to know them.

Truck handling systems, like cars, have become more sophisticated and the vehicle brakes are an active component of the vehicle’s safety system - and this cannot be altered willy nilly.

Whether, when all factors are considered this added compliance burden will be beneficial to the NZ economy as a whole (and, in my view, this is the real question) - I don’t know. I am aware that the most fundamental problem for inservice heavy motor vehicles is whether the brakes operate at all and this has to be addressed first.

Are we simply becoming busier and busier doing things that the world doesn’t care about?? The cynic in me says there is a risk that active vehicle safety systems for trucks will only guarantee that the crashes, when they do occur, will be at worse because they will be at a higher speed. Driver’s have to drive within the vehicle’s limitations and not use these new active safety systems for getting from A to B quicker.

We invite and encourage comments. If you would like to comment on this post - or suggest a new item for discussion, please click on the (No) Comments link below. It’d be great to hear what you are thinking!