For Trailequip, ensuring our products have a high level of rust resistance is very important to us.
Just have a look next time you’re out driving – so many trailers have rusty couplings, rusty jockey wheels, rusty hubs… you get the idea. Rust is an indication of the metal of that product being corroded, weakening the unit. That means if you’re seeing rust, you’re seeing a product whose structural soundness has been compromised – and that’s not something we want said about parts supplied by Trailequip!

A badly rusted boat trailer suspension system - a result of lack of care and poor quality product

Our new, ISO certified salt spray tester arrived last month and the Quality Control (QC) and Product Development (PD) teams are excited about the improvement this will bring. It is the QC and PD teams’ roles to ensure that Trailparts range is offering our customers the very best corrosion resistance for the NZ Environment – they came up with the below list of reasons why our own salt spray tester puts us ahead of the pack.

Some of the reasons we have our own salt-spray tester are:

Real World Application

We need to check that our products stand up to real-world application. A vast number of NZ’s trailers are used in beach environments, and just general towing on roads exposes the components to harsh salts and compounds on the roadways. Our salt-spray tester allows us to check exactly what’s going to happen to our products when they hit that environment.

Batch Comparisons

Each batch we receive is salt-spray tested and the results are compared to make sure the quality is the same or better than previous batches. This test is done before the goods are released for sale so we can ensure that our products meet our strict quality control standards before delivering them to our customers.

Working for Market Leading Product Quality

There are other great brands on the market. We salt-spray test our parts against other brands equivalent parts to ensure the Trailparts range is market leading in the fight against corrosion.

Investment and In-House Freedom of Control

To outsource salt-spray testing costs around $1,900 per 100 hours! We are testing some of our products for 500 hours so our salt-spray tester paid itself off long ago as well as allowing harsher and longer testing periods. There’s a few other benefits linked to this as well. By reducing testing costs, we’re able to pass on savings to our customers as testing and development costs associated with products are much lower. Having the ability to do in-house testing also puts us ahead of companies in the industry who find the cost of these tests to be prohibitive.

Improving Our Customers Lives

Any Hire Centre will tell you about the ‘touch points’ on a trailer. These are the coupling, the jockey wheel, chain & shackle, 7-pin plug; all the bits that their client touches when they use the trailer. When even one of these parts has rust, it makes the whole trailer look like it is lower quality, and that’s something we want to help our customers and their customers avoid. 

There's also not much that's more frustrating (and expensive) than a breakdown due to component failure. Think towing or transport costs, time wasted waiting for repairs or a holiday ruined because your boat trailer is high and dry in a repair workshop somewhere...the list goes on. Salt-spray testing means that the products we're putting into the market are much less likely to cause this to happen, saving end users time, money and frustration!

Improving Safety on NZ’s roads

Safety through innovation is a huge focus of our PD team - no one wants to crash, and certainly no one wants to be responsible for a death. Rust is a corrosion process and, if left unattended to, could cause some component to fail on a trailer and result in a serious accident. Maximizing our corrosion resistance through testing and development enables us to ensure our product will last on the field and ensures the safety of user of our products and the people around them on the road.