STG FINANCE IS HERE TO HELP YOU.
Buying the right truck can be a great asset to your business. Buy the wrong truck, and you could burn a lot of money.
Consider these three questions before you buy your next truck and then thank me. By the way, I like red.
1. What kind of roads will the truck drive on regularly?
Think about this – on a day to day basis, industries such as construction, mining and forestry heavily rely on their trucks to bring in income for the business. These trucks frequently encounter heavy terrain and harsh working conditions.
The reality of it is, a lot of trucks are not built for these harsh working conditions, they’re built to travel on sealed and predominantly even roads. When consistently travelling on unsealed roads, it puts a massive amount of stress on the truck’s chassis and suspension components. As a result of this, you can wear and tear the truck very quickly with stress cracks or worse, a split in the chassis.
2. Will dust be present where the truck will be?
The presence of dust is common in construction and mining industries. It’s not unusual to see trucks covered in dust and dirt, but have you thought about the implications when it gets on the inside? Buying some heavy-duty truck wash and hosing down the truck can fix the exterior, but how do you fix the interior? To minimise the chance of the engine failure and performance deterioration, you must regularly clean and maintain the engine properly. Simply put, the more your truck is used on dirt and gravel roads, the more you need to keep up with maintenance regimes.
3. Will water be present where the truck will be?
Another issue trucks see to are rust problems. Water is very common around construction and mining sites. For certain trucks, exposing it to water can be extremely damaging over the long run as it can be very corrosive and can eat up the truck’s steel components. More often than not, these components will only be coated in the minimum amount of paint as manufacturers don’t expect the truck to be used off-road. Make sure you know what your future truck will be exposed to and buy accordingly.
Take our Water Trucks as an example, they are used for fire prevention, compaction, street wet downs and mainly mining operations to control dust. It’s built to carry water, so we’ve made sure to fully hot dip galvanise all our water tanks to ensure they don’t rust out.
Trucks are quite an investment and you don’t want to go into buying one without undertaking research to make sure what you’re buying is manufactured to suit your working conditions. With such an investment, you’d want to promote the longevity of the unit to make sure it brings in as much revenue as it possibly can.