Fasteners accelerate truck trailer production

A French manufacturing company is seeing the benefits of a change from welding to the use of fasteners supplied by a UK company, in the assembly of subframes for heavy goods vehicles.

Carrosserie Trouillet, based in the Centre region of France, manufactures trailers for the 3.5 and 12t truck market, and has customers throughout Northern France.

Founded in 1957, the company moved to its current factory site at Neuville in 1988, currently employs 110 people and produces approximately 2000 trailers a year.

Huck Fasteners engineers high-quality, high-performance fastening systems for a variety of applications but predominantly in the trailer, commercial vehicle body builder, railcar, truck and auto markets.

Although based in Telford (England) the company has a dedicated commercial sales team and well established distribution network throughout France and the rest of Europe.

Eric Trouillet, Managing Director at Carrosserie Trouillet, said: "We started using Huck's fasteners because they seemed like a truly viable alternative to the problems that welding presented.

In addition, Huck's technical information and customer support for the products and tooling has always been excellent and their experience and advice with regard to which fastener to use when assembling truck chassis influenced our decision to change.

In fact, by using fasteners in the sub frame production the trailers are lighter, allowing for a heavier load overall - a benefit noted by our customers.

Production time has also significantly reduced to 1.5h from 4h per trailer and the job is much cleaner and easier to carry out.

We have, therefore, saved time and money in the operation and health and safety conditions have improved for our workers".

Eric Didier is the Customer Manager for Huck in France.

He said: "Carrosserie Trouillet are a key customer for Huck and it is encouraging to see such obvious benefits to them from using our fasteners, especially when the advantages they have gained are passed on to their customers.

We are looking forward to supplying them in the future when they move into producing trailers for 19 and 26t trucks".

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