Solving Mixed Fleet Loading Without Redesigning Bays

Walk through any modern distribution yard and you’ll see the problem straight away: vans, rigids, 45-footers, all turning up at the same site, all needing to be loaded. The trouble is that most docks were built with one type of vehicle in mind. For a long time the only fix was civil works; knocking bays about, pouring new concrete, the whole disruptive lot.

That’s the gap we set out to close. Your equipment should work around your fleet, not the other way round, and you shouldn’t have to turn the warehouse into a building site to make it happen.

Where fixed infrastructure falls short
A standard dock leveller with a fixed conveyor is brilliant at one thing: loading large trailers. The moment a smaller van pulls up, the limits show. The conveyor can’t reach the floor of the van, so something has to give, and usually what gives is your operation:
– Bays sit empty because the wrong vehicle turned up at the right door
– Operators end up manually bridging the gap, which is where injuries start
– Vans get pushed into corners of the yard they weren’t meant to use, snarling up traffic for everything else

The Bendy Boom: one bay, any vehicle
The Bendy Boom is our answer. It’s a non-hydraulic telescopic loader with an articulated final section that declines by 25°, giving roughly 850mm of vertical drop at the nose. In practice, that means the same machine can be loading a trailer one minute and reaching down into a transit van the next.

A few things this changes:
– Throughput stays consistent at around 1,200 parcels an hour, regardless of what’s at the door
– Operators get a sensible working height for every vehicle, instead of stretching or stooping
– It drops into the same footprint as a conventional telescopic conveyor, so no bay redesign

More mobility, if you need it
Not every facility wants its loaders bolted in one spot, and we’ve planned for that:
– Traversing chassis options let a single telescope serve multiple gates, mounted on either sunken or surface-fixed rails
– Fully mobile units for sites without dedicated dock doors, so you can put the loader wherever today’s volume actually is

The point
Sorting out a mixed fleet doesn’t have to mean a capital project. The Bendy Boom turns an existing dock into a universal loading point that handles anything from a transit van to a 45-footer, in the space you already have. Your bays earn their keep, your operators stay out of harm’s way, and the parcels keep moving, whatever pulls up next.