Soil, Mulch Producers Floored By Vehicle Unloading System

By P.J. Heller

   Companies involved in delivering soil, mulch, compost and other landscape materials — whether to resellers or garden centers — know those jobs can be extremely labor intensive. They also know that time and efficiency is an important factor in turning a profit.
   “Everything is involved around somebody’s sweat and muscle,” says Howie Sewell. “It’s pure labor, labor, labor.”
   But Sewell and others have come up with a unique solution —a movable floor system that can be installed in truck and trailer bodies — to easily and efficiently off-load material.
   “It does save a lot of labor,” notes Jerry McCandless, vice president of Piedmont Trailer Repair, Inc., in Thomasville, N.C. “It’s sort of like having another man on the job, except you only pay him once. He’s never sick. He’s never late. He doesn’t want benefits. He just shows up. You pull a lever and he’s ready to work.”
   A handful of manufacturers, notably Hallco Industries, Inc., of Tillamook, Ore., Keith Mfgr. Co., in Madras, Ore., and newcomer Weaver Mulch in Coatesville, Pa., sell movable flooring systems to truck and trailer builders who then install or retrofit one of them into vehicle bodies for their customers.
   Among those builders are Piedmont, Innovative Trailers, Inc., and Titan Trailers in Ontario, Canada.
   “You definitely do see more and more of the mulch material on live floors. . .” says Richard Parker, president of Innovative Trailers, a trailer and semi-trailer manufacturer in Texarkana, Texas.
   Parker’s company installs moving floors from both Keith and Hallco. He describes the two companies as the “cornerstone” of the U.S. market for moving floors.
   Titan Trailers installs Keith’s “Walking Floor” in vehicles used by companies hauling such things as green waste, bulk grains and wood products.
   The moving floor allows the trailers to unload anywhere in minutes, even on uneven ground, the company says. Trailers can also be top loaded, baler loaded or compactor loaded, it adds.
   Keith first introduced the Walking Floor in the 1970s and today the system is utilized by industries ranging from soil and mulch to timber, solid waste and paper. Hallco initially developed its “Live Floors” system for the agricultural industry and has since also expanded into numerous other markets. Both the Walking Floor and Live Floors are similar in operation.
   Both systems employ a hydraulically-powered system to move a series of aluminum slats and planks to carry material across the surface. The slats and planks are available in a variety of widths and thicknesses to meet specific applications.
   “It provides a lightweight way to self-unload the high-density materials,” Parker says.
   “It’s a very straightforward product,” notes Scott Cloud, a sales representative with Keith. “The beauty of the Walking Floor is that it can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. Our company has worked to be as diverse as we can. We adapt our products to what the companies need.”
   Unlike slats and planks system or a conventional conveyor belt, Weaver Mulch uses a wrapping belt system that is always connected to hydraulically-driven rollers in the front and rear of the truck.
   “When you load the truck, your belt is on the front roll and laid across floor and connected to the rear roll, but is not wrapped on the rear roll,” explains David Weaver, who designed the system. “To unload, the hydraulics turn the back shaft, unwrap the front and wrap it up in the back, taking the load off. When the load is off, you wrap it back up again hydraulically and then it’s ready to load.”
   Weaver Mulch began using its “Scrolling Floor” in its own vehicles in 1997 and recently began marketing its wrapping belt system to truck and trailer manufacturers.
   J&J Truck Bodies & Trailers in Somerset, Pa., is the first company to incorporate the Weaver system into its truck bodies.
   Weaver says the advantage of his system over other moving floors is speed. He says his system can unload a 43-foot trailer, including the time to wrap the belt back up, in approximately two minutes, compared to about 10 minutes for a walking floor. Keith says that depending on the configuration, its system can unload most materials in 4 to 7 minutes.
   Regardless of the system, most have been scaled down from other commercial applications to make them more suitable for soil and mulch companies, which typically operate smaller vehicles.
   The movable floor also eliminates issues and problems with dump truck deliveries. One of the main hassles, according to officials of the moving floor companies, is having to deal with overhead utility lines, tree limbs and other overhead obstacles.
   “If you’re backing into someone’s yard and you’ve got grandma’s favorite tree there that she planted 30 years ago, you can’t always raise a dump body up and dump,” says McCandless, whose company installs floors from Keith in its truck bodies.
   “When you have a moving floor system, as long as you can drive to it you can unload there,” Cloud adds.
   Sewell, a regional sales manager with Hallco, says a moving floor also provides more flexible options to deliver either multiple products or portions of the same product.
   With dump vehicles, he says, “about the only thing you could do was dump the load in the driveway and then start shoveling and wheel-barrowing. It was twice the work.
   “We see people getting more innovative with our product,” Sewell says. “They don’t have to just bring one load for delivery and then come back for another.”
   Instead, he explains, they can use tarps to separate different materials and off-load each of them at different locations.
   “They’re just adapting it to where it makes it a lot easier to use,” he says.
   Piedmont Trailer has taken that concept even further, having installed electronic scales into a 21-yard vehicle body used by a landscape supply company. By knowing the weight per yard of material, deliveries can be made more accurately.
   “He can load 21 yards or so and make multiple deliveries before he comes back to the yard because the scales allow him to put off the exact amount of material the customer is buying,” says McCandless, who has been in the family business for 34 years. The company was started by his father in 1961.
   “In the past,” he says, “it was pretty much just a guess as to how much [material] you were putting on. If you did multiple stops, you would have to load each stop on the truck and make a trip out and come back to the yard and then load the next stop. So it actually saves time, saves fuel. The customers get all they pay for but you don’t give any product away by guessing. You actually sell all you’re putting on the truck.”
   Weaver says his belt system can also be used to separate loads or to unload portions of product, simply by running the belt to a certain point and then stopping it. The system is controlled by a computer and a limiting switch to control how far the belt travels.
   “It automatically travels a certain distance and then it stops,” Weaver says. “Then it wraps back up a certain distance. We pretty much made it idiot-proof.“
   You can use a tarp,” he adds. “We even have used a plywood divider that hung over the top rail that you could set to a certain spot and load two different products on either side and the divider moved back with the load. The tarp idea would work as well as any.”
   Parker’s Innovative Trailers company takes the concept of the moving floors to an even greater level, with the installation of a Hallco moving floor in a landscape and construction utility trailer. The moving floor not only allows material to be unloaded from the rear of the trailer, but also allows it to be moved toward the front, where it is deposited onto a belt at the floor level and then onto an elevated belt for quicker and more precise discharge out of the side of the trailer.
   Elevating the discharge of the material makes it a simple matter to get it into a loader bucket or wheel barrow.
   “Everything we do is remote-controlled for quick starts and stops,” Parker says.
   The discharge method is so efficient that city officials in Irving. Texas, found that it took three workers only 15 to 20 minutes to put down mulch in a highway median strip compared to four people working two hours utilizing a dump trailer.
   The tow-behind trailers range in size up to about 20-yard capacity, says Parker, whose company has been in business for 15 years.
   Cloud says that environmental issues, including the use of biomass to fuel energy plants and the public’s growing interest in using compost, are driving more companies to look at moving floor systems to deliver the materials.
   “It’s still a blossoming market,” McCandless adds.
   Cloud says moving floor systems “work fantastic for any type of bulk materials: green waste, mulch soil. It has worked well for many, many years. We’re excited to see the industry grow. We’re excited to see more environmentally responsible people driving this industry.”