JKH Drainage was established 53 years ago in Essex before moving to premises in Mildenhall in Suffolk a few years later. The founder’s grandson and JKH MD Daniel Prince has recently overseen a further move down the road to a 6 acre site which will give the company the capacity to grow and take on larger projects. A key piece of equipment to cope with the increased volume of raw materials and finished products is a 35t capacity Straddle Carrier from the Irish manufacturer Combilift.
“Growth this year was at around 30% and we expect this to continue due to ongoing large infrastructure projects such as rail links, road improvement schemes and in housing construction,” said Daniel. “These all generate increased demand for our products which we like to call ‘offsite solutions for onsite problems’. Together with our partner Althon, we supply standard and bespoke precast concrete products such as underground drainage chambers, headwalls and outfalls for pipes as well as gratings and steelworks to customers across the UK.”
When the move to the new site was in the planning stages, Daniel and his team looked at options for handling the heavier and bulkier products when they are demoulded inside the casting facility and taken to external storage areas. These currently weigh around 8.5t, but will soon increase to 12t in a single cast, so extra lift capacity needed to be factored in to any new equipment. Gantry cranes were initially considered but quickly discounted as they would have taken up too much of the already limited vertical space.
“We can move smaller, standard castings with our regular forklifts,” said Daniel, “but once you get above around 6t, or for bespoke oversized products that can have a footprint of 2.5 x 4m, this gets problematic as load stability becomes an issue. We therefore investigated the potential of a Combi-SC straddle carrier as recommended by Jimmy Pascavage of Fork Truck Direct.” Each Combi-SC is a bespoke unit to accord with the varied requirements of a customer’s specific application, and it took a fair bit of liaison between Daniel, Jimmy, Combilift’s SC specialist Stephen Wells and engineers at Combilift’s factory to come up with the final specs for JKH’s machine.
With a telescopic facility, the SC’s closed height of 5.5m enables it to pass through the 5.8m high doorway, where it has just enough clearance in the 6m roof space to lift the largest castings and take them to the outside storage areas. Chains can be connected to various points on the two side shifting beams mounted on the top of the frame and the full open telescopic height of 8.1m offers plenty of room for castings to be rotated and set down at the most suitable storage angle. The remote control model chosen by JKH offers very good all round visibility for one operator without the need for banksmen. Diesel power was considered the most suitable as the Combi-SC spends around 75% of its time working outdoors across the extensive site.
“Combilift has provided us with a high level of versatility when handling products and when we need to load them onto trailers for customer delivery,” said Daniel. “At 1.8 acres, our old site was much smaller, and the extra space represents a vast increase in business opportunities. We currently manufacture around 50t a day, and we wanted to future proof our handling procedures from the outset, and this is exactly what we have done.”
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