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.
5. Strength
There is considerably more to designing safe horse areas than you would at first imagine. Not only do we design strength and durability for loading, transporting and stationary horses, but we also must incorporate strength and durability for the worst-case scenario of an accident. For horseboxes legislation on this topic is wanting, to say the least. This leaves customers in the unenviable position of researching and sifting through information. Ultimately, they must trust they have chosen a conscientious builder.
Probably the most alarming headline fact on this topic is that even in a relatively slow accident, an average horse will impact on the bulkhead wall or the horse partitions with a force many times its body weight. If you add to this scenario the vehicle overturning, then many other forces are at work and a good design will see all these factors taken into consideration.
Our research findings
There are plenty of reports and a free impact force calculators on the internet for accidents in general. We could not find any specifically for horseboxes, and picking through what information was available didn’t answer all our questions. Therefore, we turned to a professional organisation (the VBRA) for information on testing.
Designing the horse area in our horseboxes
Having already designed our bulkheads to take the impact of horses in an accident scenario, we wanted to incorporate additional safety for side impacts or even an overturned horsebox.
Consequently, we have added a structural safety cell around the horses on all models. Into this, we incorporate double skinned walls to protect from side impact. This has the additional benefit of protecting the outer wall from horses that kick!
For safety, we have always over engineered our horse partitions and horse gates. Considering the scenario of an overturned horsebox, we have redesigned safer horse partition and horse gate fasteners.
One last safety item worthy of a mention. We looked carefully at the collapsible breast bar option and decided this would compromise the structural integrity of our horseboxes (…and it only deals with the issue of rearing horses after an incident).
As a safer alternative we fit the Equi Travel Safe rails as standard to our rear facing models.
We use the rails to add strength to our design and more importantly, the Equi Travel Safe system deals with horse rearing incidents before they even happen!
Food For Thought…
Safety and primarily horse safety is at the forefront of everything we do. Having said that if there is something we have missed or something you would add, please let us know.