Imagine a service body — complete with crane, compressor, welder and other appurtenances — that you can swap with another body, such as dump box, from the chassis of your truck.
The people at Reading Truck Body LLC and the Switch-N-Go division of Deist Industries Inc. did just that. They even brought a prototype to the 2016 Work Truck Show in Indianapolis.
“Imagine this body locked up with all the tools — no truck. It’s offsetting another body making you money,” said Omar Sandlin II, vice-president of Switch-N-Go, as he stood beside a prototype of a Reading Classic II service body mounted on a Switch-N-Go detachable subframe.
Omar Sandlin II
Omar Sandlin II, vice-president of sales and marketing with Diest Industries Inc., promotes the company’s Switch-N-Go service body prototype it has developed with Reading Truck Body LLC.
“It’ll be locked up so that the operators can use their own vehicles to drive up to the job site,” Sandlin said. “So imagine you have one truck and you have 12 of these bodies all over town at different locations making money for you with your crew.”
Switch-N-Go brought the prototype to the Work Truck Show, March 1-4, to get some feedback from show attendees on the design. Among the suggestions was that for the Switch-N-Go application the service body wouldn’t need wheel-well cutouts because the frame mounts on a flatbed. So the companies will be looking at utilizing that wheel-well space for another use, such as a pass-through compartment for piping.
The Switch-N-Go system utilizes a winch, ranging in capacity from 9,000 to 18,000 pounds, to load and unload the various boxes from the chassis.
“So you have safe, ergonomic ground level loading at all times,” Sandlin said.
The service body prototype project came together after he approached “a dear old friend,” Andrew Schumacher, engineering manager at Reading, Sandlin said. The two had known each other when Schumacher was with Omaha Standard Palfinger, and they both served on the National Truck Equipment Association’s Lightweight Materials Technology Council, which Sandlin noted “I am fortunate enough to chair.”
Sandlin is also good friends with Craig Boham, Reading’s vice-president of sales and business development. Those relationships “made it a no-brainer for us to partner with Reading,” Sandlin said.
He also noted that Reading’s facility in Reading, Pa., is only about five hours away from the Switch-N-Go plant in Hadley, Pa. “So the design and prototyping process was efficient.”
In an article on the NTEA website, Bonham said Reading is “excited” to work with Switch-N-Go on the project.
“This system will greatly expand the flexibility for the general contractor," Bonham said.
Sandlin said it will also work for a service body configured as a mechanics truck.
“If you have a platform and you want to put a work bench bumper on that, and you want to put a small crane in the corner of it, anything like that is doable,” Sandlin said. “A welder — absolutely.”