KPH Safety First
As a forward-thinking company, we continually strive to manufacture quality horseboxes that are safer, reduce stress and have increased durability.
The KPH innovative safety designs have many years of research and development behind them.
Over the next few months, we will post some of our research topics including insights, and considerations that we use to design safer horseboxes
Hopefully, these topics will be something horse owners will find insightful and interesting.
4. Durability
Having built a reputation over many decades for quality, safety, and durability, we know only too well how important material choices can be. It goes without saying that areas where horses are loaded or transported need to be free from sharp edges and any possible danger. However, there are many more design considerations to a safe design. Horses can kick, bite, stamp, and rear and therefore a safe design with appropriate materials, parts, and finishes must work for the lifespan of the horsebox. We design our durability (lifespan) to be 20 years plus and consequently material choices for durability outweigh cost or even ease of manufacture!
Our Research Findings
Let’s start with our research on suitable metals for manufacture of key components including horse partitions, horse doors and ramps.
If you are looking for the best possible lifespan, steel and aluminium although cheaper to buy and work, just don’t last long enough for every component part. If we take aluminium as an example, it will have significant weight and cost savings for a ramp, yet it has some rather large disadvantages. If you mix it with other materials and don’t separate them with a barrier, it rots alarmingly fast
Here is a blog explaining the issue in more detail – https://www.kphltd.co.uk/aluminium-in-horseboxes/
Additionally, aluminium does not cope well with flexing and takes considerable expertise and workmanship to design and manufacture joints, hinge fixings etc, that allow flexing without causing structural cracks.
The section shape of component parts also has a safety aspect that we consider. It is commonplace to see horse partitions or horse gates manufactured in square sections with quite sharp corners. This simplifies manufacturing and reduces cost, yet despite these savings, when the goal is horse safety, round sections are preferable because they are edge free.
Edge cappings are commonplace in horse areas and ramps. From experience, cappings are one of the worst offenders causing a multitude of related problems including sharp edges. Screws and fixings come loose exposing sharp edges, and poor manufacturing techniques or corner cutting sees them fitted with no sealer adhesive allowing urine, water, and chemicals to rot anything underneath.
Paddings and other horse area items are often fitted with screws and other fixings. They are safe at first and regardless of how diligent the fitter has been, over the life of the horsebox, they can become lose and problematic over time. A prime example is when kick sheets are screwed to the wall in the horse area, they expand dramatically in the sun/heat and then contract as the day cools. This continual expanding and contracting over time can loosen screws and leave them exposed to the horses.
Designing the horse area in our horseboxes
Our reputation hinges on safety, durability and quality and our ultimate goal is to provide the safest possible horse area with a durability of 20 years plus. For KPH it is the most important part of the build and the area where we have invested the most resources. For the Aeos and Helios horseboxes the redesigned horse areas and ramps are free from screws, fixings, edges and cappings. Our design considers daily steam cleaning, chemicals, heat expansion and contraction, vibration, and material lifespan.
We have removed screws and fixings wherever possible and replaced them with the latest body tapes and glues.
By using Coat-X Polyurea protective coating we have removed kick sheets along with any edges or cappings, replacing them with a waterproof seamless finish.
For our beautiful horse partitions and horse gates we use stainless steel tube with thick paddings encapsulated with Coat-X. The paddings are glued back-to-back and again are completely waterproof.
For superb durability, every feasible part has been swapped to stainless steel and this even includes the ramps and hinges on all models.
Food for thought…..
Our innovative designs rely heavily on customer feedback for testing and improvements. If you have one of our horseboxes, we would love to hear any thoughts you have regarding our horse areas?
We have made many changes that add to horse safety or quality and durability. Having said that, these changes come at a financial cost.
We would love to know how customers view initial cost as compared to safety, durability and depreciation?