Talking tyres - everything you need to know about trailer wheels to keep your business moving
With the vast number of hours spent on the road, commercial vehicles and trailers are extremely vulnerable to stresses and strains, often leading to unfortunate accidents that can vary from inconvenient to life-threatening.
Reducing your time spent on the road is neither an option, nor of benefit to any thriving business. What you can do, however, is ensure that your vehicle is adequately maintained and frequently checked to minimise the risk of any preventable downtime or unnecessary accidents.
It should be of little surprise that regular checks of your vehicles, trailers and towing equipment should be a part of your daily routine to keep your fleet, and the public safe. While MOTs and services are a great start, they are often nowhere near sufficient to ensure a safe operation all year round.
In a recent government report titled ‘Commercial operators urged to carry out regular maintenance’, it was exposed that “more than 60% of HGV prohibition defects found at the roadside 3 months after the MOT could have been reported and fixed before beginning a journey or noticed when driving the vehicle.”
The report went on to explain “Drivers generally don’t want to use an unroadworthy vehicle but sometimes they don’t realise how dangerous a vehicle can be, even with the simplest of fault.”
The report urges commercial fleets and drivers to review the frequency of their maintenance checks and ensure repairs are identified early and rectified quickly.
Ensuring you, and your drivers, perform adequate pre-journey checks, as well as a regular, and thorough maintenance routine, is not only a safe practice, but it can also help save you time, money, and energy when it comes to preventing unnecessary downtime.
With that in mind, it’s often useful to revisit your maintenance procedures on a regular basis to make sure your team are professionally trained, and your routine is adequately identifying potential issues before they become serious problems. That way, you can ensure that downtime is kept to a bare minimum (if at all!) by carrying all the essential replacement parts and spares in-house.
No one needs reminding of the importance of wheel safety. Wheel detachment and related accidents continues to be a big problem and is largely a result of careless torque or unchecked damage such as corrosion. A thorough pre-journey check can be sufficient to prevent any dangerous accidents, but issues can often go unspotted without the use of adequate support mechanisms.
Wheel nut tightening, and identifying loss of torque can be made much easier using wheel nut indicators that visually indicate any movement. Equally, wheel nut link retainers reduce the risk of loosening by securing wheel nuts in place for longer. We recommend the use of both for optimal safety.
Ensuring that any fault and repair work is well documented gives you an indication of when the part was renewed, and the reason for the renewal. If you notice that a part continually needs replacing, it might be time to perform a more in-depth check.
Carrying a wide range of wheel and tyre assemblies in stock, aswell as everything you need to ensure your safe on the road, helps your business avoid any last-minute panics or the unnecessary grounding of a vehicle.
TRAILPARTS® keeps a huge selection of the most common replacement and spare parts from both well-known brands and other high-quality alternatives. We have some 150,000 parts on our shelves! Wite the vast majority of these available on our website, conveniently arranged by category to make finding the right part simple. We can even deliver your products to you the very next day where possible with our FREE NEXT DAY DELIVERY - We’ll ship your order to you FOC on all orders over £150!
Once you are aware of an issue, there is often several compatible options available for your replacement parts, from established brands to lesser known/non-brand alternatives that could be equally as efficient and cost-effective for your business.
When making this decision, one of the most important considerations you will be compatibility. It’s not worth buying a replacement part that doesn’t fit your vehicle, trailer, or welfare cabin properly, so to avoid making costly mistakes that waste your time and money, you need to make sure that you know what you’re looking for in your replacement parts.
Carrying a selection of the useful essentials and most common replacement parts in your garage or workshop prevents unnecessary downtime and can keep your vehicle, trailer, or welfare cabin on the road when you need it to be.
With a huge range of over 150,000 products on our website, our expert team can be on hand at any point to ensure you understand the compatible alternatives available to you.
A consolidated supplier such as Trailparts Group can help you find all the spare and replacement products you need in one place, with one order, and usually one delivery, saving you time, energy, and money.
Whether you’re looking Wheel and Tyre assemblies, Brakes and Cables, Jockey Wheels, Electrics, Security products or many, many more product ranges, we have over 150,000 spare parts in stock for your trailer, towed equipment, vehicle and welfare units.
By placing your order, through a consolidated supplier such as Trailparts Group, you can quickly and easily trace your order using one platform and through one order number. We also aim to dispatch orders in one delivery where possible, giving you piece of mind that all the parts you need to complete your job will land on your doorstep when you need them to.
To discuss more about the importance of regular checks and how Trailparts Group can help you to keep your business moving forward, please reach out to one of our experts today wh will be happy to help.