As businesses continue to innovate and become increasingly competitive, it is becoming more important for them to get the most out of their capital equipment purchases. One area where West-Trans has seen a giant leap forward in the recent past is in the application of hook lifts.

While the traditional use of hook lifts has been primarily in the waste and recycling sectors, hook lifts are seeing more and more use in the building and infrastructure construction and mining and exploration sectors. Most people would be familiar with seeing a hook lift carrying a large waste bin. However, innovative customers are now building custom hook-lift bodies, which they can load and unload quickly and easily to optimise their primary asset, their truck.

West-Trans Here to Service Your Industry

Consider the needs of a small excavation company, for example. The excavator is loaded into a tipper-body-style bin and lifted onto the vehicle. Both the bin and excavator are taken to the job site and dropped off. The excavator is able to work all day, filling the bin/tipper without tying up an expensive piece of equipment, while the truck goes and tips a bin of loaded fill or relocates another excavator and bin to a new job site.

In the mining sector, we are seeing a leaf taken out of the military playbook. These custom bodies are constructed as remote camp support units and fitted with water tanks, diesel tanks and generators, or relocatable kitchens or workshops. The units are taken to the site, dropped, and left for a week, a month, or a year, providing the crew with the resources needed to be safe, comfortable, and efficient.

Hook lifts are an incredibly efficient way to handle your loading and unloading operations. Whatever your industry — whether you’re hauling containers or landscaping debris in a municipal area or out remote in agriculture or forestry — the hook lift’s flexibility and versatility make handling your transportation logistics easier.

Built Tough, Built for Australia

Built for Australian conditions, our hook-lifts are manufactured using high-tensile steel, making them a hardy choice of equipment to add to your loading and unloading operations. They are protected by an anti-corrosive primer base, which we follow with two further coats of protective black paint or any colour of your choice. More than this, all of our machinery and components comply with Australian standards, Australian Design Rules (ADRs) and all relevant codes.

Improving the efficiency of a hook-lift-fitted truck a step further, the use of a custom dog trailer is becoming very popular. In applications where the vehicle may be travelling for several hours between lift and drop/empty, such as a remote worksite or from a transfer station to a processing site, the investment of an extra 10 minutes to place a bin on a dog trailer, and carting two bins, far out weights cost and time required to make multiple trips.

West-Trans: Customised Your Way

West-Trans Equipment is now offering the West-Trans-built custom dog trailer, as either a tipping trailer or a simple rail and lock trailer, as a matched combination to its tough and ever-reliable HL20 and HL20A Hook Lifts. The driver drops the trailer, lifts the first bin onto the truck, reverses back to the trailer and places the bin on the trailer, lifts the second bin onto the truck, reconnects the trailer and hydraulics, locks both bins and drives away.

The custom dog trailers can also be supplied with a swing-away “West-Transcover” tarp tower system, meaning the driver never needs to climb onto a vehicle to secure the load. The West-Transcover tarp towers are unique in that they are airlifted, with an electric tarp retract motor, rather than heavy and more complex hydraulic lifts and motors. This makes them almost half the weight of a traditional hydraulic tarp tower system while also being around 30% cheaper to supply and fit.

Far from one standard sizing, our hook-lift designs come in a range of versatile sizes to meet the needs of every operation and work site. Our HL 6 hook lift is a compact model that offers excellent flexibility at the lighter end of load-bearing needs, able to lift up to a respectable 6000kg. At the other end of our range is the HL 26 hook lift, which comes with an incredible 26,000kg lifting capacity for those heavy-duty jobs.

The Only Name You Need in Hook-Lift Equipment

When it comes to adding lifting parts to your fleet of trucks, look no further than West-Trans Equipment. The benefits and advantages of a West-Trans hook lift are second to none in convenience, safety, and reliability. In addition, we offer services and replacement parts for all of your West-Trans machinery. After all, we know our systems best and how to get the absolute most out of our hook lift equipment. With West-Trans, you’re in good hands.

Call 1300 877 411 today and speak to a West-Trans specialist for more information about the best hook lift system for your truck or commercial needs.