Words: LANA BEST
Pictures: GLADYSBARRETA
BACK in 2011 Graeme Elphinstone, a specialist in designing and manufacturing log truck trailers and power pole transport trailers, thought “we’ve got a little winner here”.
But there was nothing little about it.
He had just completed testing his new EasySteer suspension semi-trailer and he was relying on its success to save the jobs of 14 employees at his Triabunna workshop.
At the time native forest harvesting had all but ended, Gunns was in liquidation, woodchip operations had ground to a halt and Tasmania’s Forestry industry was barely clinging on.
Elphinstone Engineering has been building a new log truck trailer every four working days, and it suddenly slowed to just one a month.
“The two or three years after that were extremely hard,” he admitted. “We halved our turnover and lost all of our money and had to basically rebuild the business again.”
“What we had designed was something better suited to long-haul general freight on the mainland – there was no business from the logging industry any more.”
Within a few months he had the first prototype at the Melbourne Truck Show where it received rave reviews, and with much excitement he took the design to the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator.
Graeme was floored when the regulatory body knocked it back, treating the trailer as a belly axle which Graeme says with a bitter taste in his mouth – it absolutely was not.
“They were incompetent to knock it back on that basis, and they went on to approve the same set up on other vehicles some years later,” Graeme said.
Devastated at having to lay off his workforce, the EasySteer trailer was put on the backburner – until recently.
Still to go through Performance Based Standards (PBS) with the NHVR, the first unit has just been sold to Law Transport and more orders are in the pipeline.
With a single point pivot the trailer is set up to distribute weight evenly on all axles in the group, to traverse up to three-and-a-half degree humps in the road and stay fully load sharing, in this case, to all 12 wheels on three axles.
This in turn means less wear and tear on tyres and suspensions, less fuel to tow the trailer – and it includes a bigger payload.
“It might mean a $50-$60,000 investment for a tri-axle semi-trailer, but it allows an extra carting capacity of around four tonnes which, with every tonne of payload worth about $10,000 to a trucker each year, means the cost is returned within two years,” he said.
“One of our EasySteer trailers on the road up in Queensland is doing a round trip of 2700km, one way empty and one way loaded, and using 170 litres less in fuel.”
Originally from Burnie, Graeme has been in Triabunna for 52 years.
He employs 40 people, another 15 in Melbourne, and is one of a dwindling number of true Australian manufacturers left in the country.
His background was in farming and falling trees, working as a logging supervisor at chip mills.
At age 74, and remarried just five years ago, the word retirement isn’t even in his vocabulary.
A keen sailor, he only gets to do a bit of cruising these days, but he has a Sydney to Hobart and seven Three Peaks races under his belt.
He said he’s working on new things all the time, and part of the businesses’ ability to survive downturns is being able to build all the components they require, such as wiring harnesses. He also sells components to other manufacturers.
“We’ve always been loyal to our suppliers and when there were supply chain issues we were rewarded for that,” he said.
He left school at 15 to work on his father’s farm, and together they did contract work, building dams, clearing land, and ploughing, until Graeme purchased his own first piece of equipment – a chainsaw – and learned to fell trees.
In 1971, he moved to Triabunna, and eventually became a supervisor at the Tasmanian Pulp and Forest Holdings mill, repairing chainsaws and selling spare parts in his spare time.
Graeme was working full time, but he had nothing to do on weekends. So, he decided to find more work.
“Dad had a field welder on the farm. I’d been used to working weekends, and Dad – he only had one eye so he wouldn’t touch the welder – said… ‘Do you want to take that down and pick up a little work?’ So I worked at the mill during the week, repaired chainsaws at night, and did welding jobs on the weekends.”
In 1975, after 31/2 years at the mill, Graeme handed in his notice. He’d discovered a new passion: trucks.
Working at the mill, Graeme had witnessed many truckers arguing with law enforcement about load weights. Weighing was a legal requirement, but it took time. It cost money. It caused problems. Graeme’s brother, Dale, was working as a diesel fitter in Canada at the time; working on trucks that had in-built scales. Why didn’t Australian trucks have these?
Graeme and his brother decided to import weighing systems. In 1976, Elphinstone Brothers were the first to introduce on-vehicle weighing systems in Australia.
“The first trailer we ever fitted with on-vehicle weighing was being built here in Tasmania. We went and sat down with the trailer manufacturer in Hobart and said, ‘How about fitting the load cells in while you’re building this new trailer?’
“They told us to piss off, that we didn’t know what we were doing. So when that trailer was about three or four weeks old, still brand new, we cut it up and put load cells into it ourselves.”
Graeme eventually bought his brother out of the business, and Elphinstone went from importing systems to designing their own. They started building trailers and exporting parts, and in 1985 they began creating equipment that could traverse the icy, turbulent terrain in Antarctica.
“It’s completely different, building stuff for ice. It’s not easy. Traversing is like a long-haul transport operation on snow, the distance is like running a track from Geelong to Newcastle. We did lots of different models of sleds, the first ones were on rubber tracks. They were better on soft snow. Some were on skis. We’ve done heaps of different things over the years, and all of those sleds are still travelling. They do three trips a year, 1100km each way.”
Graeme’s first Antarctic equipment was built for Australian expeditions, and in 1993 he began designing sleds for the French Polar Institute. In 2000, Graeme finally set foot on the continent himself.
He joined the expedition on the French icebreaker L’Astrolabe, driving tractors on traverse and looking after equipment on the base. He’s been back three times since, the last time in 2016.
“Like I tell young people, when opportunities present themselves, just take them.”