Increasing Safety and Lowering Expenditure in Truck Fleet Maintenance

Posted by Mark on January 9th, 2017

Fleet maintenance of heavy transportation vehicles such as buses and trucks is perhaps more critical than buying the vehicle. Due to the commercial nature of the industry, these vehicles undergo tremendous wear and tear. There may be three to four drivers per truck or bus in a fleet depending on the route but it is a safe bet that the maintenance staff required to maintain a fleet is very large. These silent heroes work in the background keeping the trucks running without a hitch. The profitability of the company boils down to;
•    minimum downtime of a truck
•    minimizing replacement costs by optimizing efficiency due to timely maintenance

One of the largest costs of replacement is the wheels of a truck. Aluminum alloy wheels are light and carry higher payloads on the multi-axle vehicles. Aluminum wheels are expensive to replace. Fleet managers will often look deeply into the performance cycles of truck wheels before they sign on the dotted line for replacements.

A key metric that will influence the manager's decision is the condition of the wheel. No sooner, a truck wheels into the truck bay maintenance personnel swarm over to the truck and fit the VIS-Polish automatic wheel polishing machine. These are portable machines and the latest variant is the HR 4.0. This is an upgrade over the HR 3.2 polisher from Vehicle Inspection Systems of Orlando, Florida. The 3.2 version is in business for almost 5 years and as such, the new upgrade is welcome news for fleet managers. The upgrade accounts for changes to hardware elements and allows the functionality and performance of the aluminum wheel polisher to be on par with earlier 3.2 version. The changes in the parameters allow reduction in time to run the sand, cut and color cycles thereby resulting in increased efficiency of the VIS-Polish machine

VIS continues to improve the efficiency of the truck wheel polisher as well as bus wheels to become easier and more efficient. The benefits to the fleet far outweigh the costs and VIS has also added that shop floors with the HR 3.2 version will work as efficient as the 4.0 version. The upgrade will be necessitated only when there is a requirement for hardware replacement of the truck wheel polisher.

Polishing equipment such as the VIS-Polish helps the trucking and transportation industry to keep a close watch on the wheels by giving the wheels;
•    pristine appearance that instills pride in the driver
•    helps him to take ownership of the vehicle
•    helps the maintenance to spot tell-tale damages
•    take remedial action quickly before the damage can spread

Vehicle Inspection Systems is committed to the safety aspect of fleet maintenance ever since they started the business of manufacturing inspection equipment for the transportation industry nearly three decades ago.