Lethal Potential

“That small tool or fitting that you always meant to tidy away could be as lethal as a bullet if it hits the back of your head,” warns Chris Jones, UK sales director at load area racking specialist Sortimo.

Nor will a home-made racking system built to house all the items you have to cart around with you be of much help. Odds are that it will break loose along with its contents if the driver has to slam on the anchors heavily, and do even more damage. OK, installing a bulkhead will help defend the cab’s occupants from all this flying debris, but even the most solidly-constructed bulkheads aren’t bomb-proof.

The reality is that it makes far more sense to have all your tools and parts contained in a professionally designed load area storage system that is unlikely to come adrift in a collision because it’s been properly crash-tested. The duty of care you owe yourself and your employees should give you every incentive to go this route.

Crash-Testing

More and more racking makers are subjecting their products to crash-testing, Sortimo among them. “We loaded the body of a van fitted with one of our racking systems onto a sled at the Transport Research Laboratory at Crowthorne in Berkshire,” explains Jones. “Itself weighing 150kg, the racking was laden with sandbags weighing approximately 365kg and the sled was accelerated to 31mph before crashing into a barrier.

“Although the vehicle fittings were distorted in the direction of travel, the load remained in place,” he continues. “The driver and passenger would have survived as the special Sortimo floor installation transferred the impact forces into the van body itself.

“A second sled test was then carried out using home-made racking installed in an identical van body with a total weight of 446kg for the racking and sandbags,” says Jones. “As the body hit the barrier it all shot forwards, filling the cab space. Anybody sitting there would probably have been killed.”

Not to be outdone, Modul-System has had its products crash-tested extensively at Volvo’s car safety centre at Gothenburg in Sweden. Bri-Stor has had similar tests carried out in the UK at the Motor Industry Research Association’s centre near Nuneaton and the Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire. “In addition we’ve got our own laboratory at our 25-acre headquarters in Hixon in Staffordshire,” says commercial director, Richard Issitt.

Weight Matters

As well as crash-testing their products, manufacturers of racking, shelving, drawer units and drawers and cabinets are doing all they can to make them lighter, but without compromising their strength. Sortimo’s Globelyst equipment, for instance, employs an aluminium framework said to cut weight by from 20 to 30 per cent.

In addition to employing strong but lightweight composite materials, Bri-Stor is making extensive use of high-strength special steels from Scandinavia says Issitt. They’re pricey but their strength means that less steel can be used, cutting the weight of the company’s products.

“It makes them almost as light as they would be if we used aluminium instead,” he says. “However, we’ve had to install new equipment to handle these steels,” he continues. “As a consequence we’ve invested £5m in our factory over the past two years.”

Alongside testing their onboard systems and cutting their weight, racking makers have been adding new products to their ranges.

New Products

Sortimo has come up with L-BOXX. It describes a family of polymer tool boxes of varying sizes that can be carried around in a van housed inside a specially-designed Globelyst unit and that can be clipped to each other.

If a technician has to tackle a demanding task that requires two or three different sets of tools, then all he needs to do is clip together the relevant boxes and clip them to the underside of his L-BOXX tool carrier. If there are too many to carry, then the stack of boxes can be placed on a sack trolley and wheeled to the job concerned.

Elsewhere, Modul-System has come up with racking packages 200mm deep designed with light vans such as Citroën’s Nemo and Renault’s Kangoo Compact in mind. They typically weigh less than 20kg, which means that they don’t eat significantly into a small van’s modest payload capacity.

Again aiming to save weight, Edstrom has devised a tool case designed to house small parts that is made of plastic, complete with a transparent lid. Its predecessor was made of steel, but Edstrom reckons that its new offering is just as tough.

Organisation

Onboard storage units make it easier for a driver to see exactly what he’s got on board. They make it less likely that he’ll have to drive back to the depot to collect a vital missing tool, losing valuable time, because he’ll easily spot that he hasn’t got it with him before he departs for his first job of the day.