The challenge was all about losing weight in the body of a meat hanger truck while not compromising strength and durability. If Serco could achieve the result, they would get an additional order. If they couldn’t, they would lose out.
Serco designers went to work examining the old meat hanger body and seeing where they could shave off as many kilograms as possible.
“A key element for the customer, Cape-Town based SPH Transport Services, who specialise in the transport of meat and fish nationally, was increasing the payload to 14 tons on an MAN 25.280 chassis, so we needed to do our sums carefully,” says Serco managing director, Clinton Holcroft.
“We re-looked at the different components used in the construction of the body such as the reinforcing in the roof and how we drill and tap the meat rails into the steel. We put more reinforcing in the floor so we could save on the weight of the sub frame and incorporated lighter engineered beams for the side wall which didn’t weigh as much as the meranti wood we used previously,” says Holcroft.
The end result was an impressive weight saving of just over 700kgs on an 8.5m body.
Serco built three of the meat hangers for the client and after achieving the required payload, was awarded an order for another two vehicles! Well done Serco on accepting the challenge, rising to it and coming out with a final solution that not only met but beat the requirements of a customer.
