04/09/2024
Case Study:
A large local wholesale seedling nursery with a fleet of small off-road “snake” trailers required major safety upgrades to 25 trailers. These unique trailers are designed to be towed in land trains of up to six trailers and equipped with a four-wheel-steering mechanism which enables the entire train to track the same path without cutting corners.
Whilst the original design was very innovative, the trailers needed the following design upgrades:
Brakes: The original trailers had no brakes and utilising 8” golf-buggy wheels, our extensive research indicated that there was no suitable braking system on the market to fit in these wheels. Sixy’s Engineering then designed a bespoke offset brake system, utilising 10” electric trailer drum brakes, mounted inboard of the wheels
Drawbars: The original drawbars utilised 50mm balls with 2t couplings, whilst the total train weight is up to 8t. Sixy’s Engineering developed a new drawbar system, utilising 70mm balls and couplings which is suitable for this application.
Slews: The slew pivot on the original trailers utilised LM “Holden type” trailer hubs which were prone to breaking. Sixy’s new design utilises a heavy duty agricultural stub assembly, which is four to five times stronger than the original.
Load retention: The original trailer design featured heavy “gullwing” rails to retain the load, which swing upwards and are supported by gas struts. The gas struts were prone to breaking and had previously caused some injuries. Sixy’s designed a simple cantilever rack retainer, with an over-centre design, which reduced the trailer weight by over 100kg and is much safer and easier to operate.
Overall: Sixy’s Engineering designed and built 25 new galvanised trailers with electric brakes, heavy duty drawbars, stronger slews and an innovative new load retention system.
The new trailers are safer, more user friendly, stronger and about 150kg lighter than the previous design.
Sixy’s also sourced heavy duty 3 point linkage drawbars to suit the stronger drawbars and supplied and installed Redarc Towpro electric trailer brake controllers on the tractors.
