Protect your trailers from corrosion

It’s too bad that corrosion isn’t a line item on a budget. Maybe it’s best that it isn’t. The figure would shock you.

It’s one thing to track replacement costs for brake parts and wheels that are prematurely removed from service, but many of your electronics-related problems like emissions faults, ABS faults and lighting are probably corrosion-related, too.

Corrosion has always been a concern, but it has worsened over the past seven or eight years, with the introduction of more corrosive road de-icing chemicals, namely magnesium chloride brine solutions. These chemicals are often mixed with a binding agent such as corn syrup or beet juice to keep the material from flowing off the road. It also adheres better to vehicles.

4 tips to fight corrosion

Corrosion is almost impossible to eliminate without spending your company into insolvency. There are, however, ways to mitigate the effects of corrosion — or in some cases forestall its onset — until you have disposed of the asset. Some of the solution starts with the equipment spec’, but most of the effort will go into maintenance.

Trent Siemens, director of maintenance, for Manitoba-based Paul’s Hauling offers a few tried and proven strategies from his years of frustration trying to keep his equipment from literally rotting away. “I can’t count how many trailers I’ve put out to pasture just because of corrosion,” he says.
1. Spec materials that resist corrosion, such as aluminum, stainless steel or galvanized steel. While these materials can be more expensive and sometimes heavier, they will outlast steel.
1. Avoid mating two components made of dissimilar metals, such as cast iron and aluminum. Galvanic corrosion will occur at the contact points. When possible, use a non-conductive barrier between the two metals.
1. Consider a midlife rehab for equipment with a long life expectancy. It may be cost effective to strip the undercarriage from the chassis and sandblast and repaint the sub-frame and suspension. That process, including wheel refinishing, will not stop corrosion but essentially puts it on pause, Siemens notes. “That delay will buy you a few years before you have to consider doing it again,” he says. “If you choose to go that route, make sure whoever is doing your sandblasting is doing a very thorough job on your equipment. Cutting corners at this step only masks the corrosion as your material continues to erode under the fresh paint.”
1. Establish a policy and procedure for repairing or replacing wiring and connectors. Use the OE connector where practical — and use it properly. Some require dielectric grease to seal the connection, some do not. Make sure your techs know the difference.

“You can no longer just brush or wash the stuff off like you could with road salt residue,” says Tom Ramsden, vice-president — sales and marketing at Manac Trailers. “That stuff is here to stay, and its corrosive properties make it very difficult for trailer manufactures to build trailers that are completely resistant to corrosion.”

Ramsden says aluminum is a partial solution, but extensive use of that material can drive up costs, and the road chemicals will eventually damage aluminum as well. He says fleets are now looking seriously at galvanized trailer components such as coupler-plates, crossmembers, bogey frames, and landing gear to resist corrosion.

“We have had galvanized door frames for 20 years now,” he says. “That’s probably where it all started, but we’re seeing customers now asking for things like galvanized bottom rails after using aluminum for the past 20 years.”

Protect your circuits

The other problem with magnesium chloride, aside from the fact that it’s a liquid that flows and then sticks to whatever it comes into contact with, is that it’s more conductive than sodium.

“The magnesium is attracted to the electricity and the copper, so it spreads faster,” says Gerry Mead, executive director of innovation at Phillips Industries. “Industry simply has to do a better job of keeping that material out of the wiring, and that means using better connectors properly, and never puncturing the wiring when doing a circuit test.”

While the cost and frustration associated with corrosion of metal components is significant, it pales in comparison to the grief that accompanies electrical problems.

“OEMs have created very sophisticated circuits that also happen to be very sensitive to changes in voltage, current or resistance … aka corrosion,” notes Trent Siemens, director of maintenance at Paul’s Hauling. “We as an industry have not done a good enough job understanding the intricacies of circuit maintenance, diagnosis or repair. Corrosion in wiring can result in some very large diagnostic and repair costs, intermittent and frustrating circuit failures, frequent breakdowns, premature component failures and everything else.”

Getting to the heart of corrosion issues takes some effort. It’s one thing to keep throwing money at the problem, buying replacement parts, but there may be more cost-effective solutions available.

Zane McCarthy, business development manager at Link Mfg, suggests fleets would be able to combat corrosion if they studied their own corrosion issues. At least they would understand what parts are failing and why, and could then take steps to solve the problems rather than just replacing failed parts.

“It’s a tricky argument to make,” he says. “Every fleet will have different issues, depending on their exposure. Hiring an engineer to study a couple of brand-new trailers over their service life would give then a good picture of what’s going wrong. For some fleets the cost of corrosion might be just a rounding error and they won’t care. For others, it’s a real issue.”

The problem comes in proving the cost of the fix. He says it not like buying an aero add-on where you can almost instantly see the difference in fuel cost after installing the device. Corrosion happens over time. It’s really annoying to pull brake linings after just a year in service, but is the fix any more cost-effective?

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I worked on deep sea going ships before becoming a long haul ruck driver and as far as corrosion onthe ships being in salt water 99% of the time these ships had ZINK plate install all over the haul of the ship so the rust would attack the zinc first and doing minor damage to the hull of that ship. So why not having something similar for road equipment???

I am surprised this hasn’t been discovered earlier and allowed companies to make repairs last or be better than they have been.