Trucking might not be the primary business of Rocky Lamattina & Sons but its innovative approach to higher productivity truck combinations is well-regarded among the road transport sector and for good reason.
In recent years, the company has compelled widespread attention with the vehicles it has launched in pursuit of greater productivity gains.
Last year saw a Stag B-triple introduced and a 30-pallet 18.2-metre fridge van split quad was unveiled the year prior. That vehicle was attached to a Kenworth K200.
The fleet according to Workshop Manager John Lamattina, will be standardising cabovers across its operations as six new K220 variants join the fleet before Christmas.
“We made a decision internally that we’re going to run with the one truck across the board,” he tells Prime Mover.
“Even on the quad there’s no need for the twin-steer to go on there. There’s no advantage in being able to carry the extra weight because the quads are already approved for PBS. We can’t physically fit anymore carrots in the trailer anyway and so the decision was made.”
That will leave the sole Kenworth T909 as a dedicated tipper truck and the last bonneted heavy vehicle in the business.
The Northern Victorian based company situated in Wemen, about an hour from Mildura, grows, harvests and ultimately transports carrots from three properties — the other two are in Kaniva three hours southwest and St George in southern Queensland.
Upgrades aren’t limited only to trucks. The business has worked diligently on mitigating its waste.
In 2010, waste was approximately 15 per cent and sometimes higher of its yield.
Two things happened. Lamattina’s got better at growing root crop to the highest standard in the industry; and it improved its packing line eventually enabling it to secure new sales of carrots it wasn’t able to previously exploit.
Now with three grades of product it can charge a premium for fresh produce, and cater to juice manufacturing, pet food and waste itself, and by doing so, have found an efficient way of eliminating it.
“There’s a lot of different markets that we can leverage by splitting what we produce,” says John.
“If there’s anything left over, we have cows, and you fatten them up and you sell them. We’ve gone from 15 even 20 per cent to zero waste. Because we’ve had to.”
Seldom limited by seasonal windows, production lasts all year round. For the workshop that means trucks are on the road every day of the week.
“When we want to go, we need to go,” says John. “At the end of the day, we have to deliver. It doesn’t matter.”
This is understandable when one of the biggest supermarket chains is a customer.
“They put in an order, we harvest the carrots, pack them and even transport them ourselves,” explains John.
“We control that chain because there can be no excuses at the end of the day. That’s how we operate. We have a no excuses policy.”
Lamattina moves 1,000 tonnes of carrots a week dirty.
That’s why the products of their partners are so vital to sustaining operations outside of the farm. The fleet of 14 trucks operates daily in the rugged conditions Australia is known the world over.
This brings with it a constellation of forces – high temperatures, heat, heavy loads, dust, long journeys, rough roads – central to the longevity and ongoing performance of the equipment.
“We want to have the best gear to do that job. Reliability for us is the story,” says John who began managing the workshop at Rocky Lamattina & Sons, of which he is one, in 2015.
The timing was important as his arrival would herald a major upgrade of the commercial vehicle fleet and see it return to Dana as the supplier of its axle assemblies.
The axles in use previously from another supplier were running too hot, leaked and sealing them had proven problematic.
When Dana approached Lamattina’s, buoyed at the time with a renewed sense of confidence in the Dana Spicer D46-170 tandem drive unit, John was willing to listen.
“Having gone away from them we had always liked Dana,” says John. “And we tried these driveheads and we haven’t gone elsewhere since.”
With linehaul accounting for some 60 per cent of road transport in Australia, Dana’s D46-170 tandem drive axle is a product developed and engineered purposefully for this segment.
By localising its drivehead assembly, Dana provides additional quality control and consistency, among many other advantages, during the drivehead build.
Rated to 110 tonnes (20.9 tonnes gross axle weight rating), the D46-170 is in operation on eight of Lamattina’s combinations.
All of the new D46-170 forward driveheads feature a full time oil pump locally designed and manufactured to improve the lubrication systems of the Dana axle assemblies, especially in linehaul applications, as they undergo recurring stress loading.
The low-pressure mechanical oil pump supplies the inter-axle differential optimum lubrication to ensure it performs whether at highway speeds at 100km/h or much slower off-road.
A full-flow 40-micron stainless steel gauze filter removes any foreign particles that find their way into the system, and it’s easily removed and cleaned, moreover, when changing the oil.
From a workshop perspective it can help to minimise maintenance requirements.
“It’s the first time we have purchased a truck and had it from factory brand-new with the pump system,” says John.
“So far, the difference we have seen is they run a little bit cooler and that adds another element to what we’re doing.”
Evaluations conducted internally by Dana suggest oil temperature can run around 10’C degrees cooler when compared to previous models without pumps.
That can make a crucial difference for a fleet such as this one which is always looking to find its limitations and push past them.
A Lamattina truck can go 900,000 kilometres and upwards just on its wheel bearings.
“Some of our heaviest weights are up to 107 tonnes gross in our four-trailer black curtainsider combination,” says John.
“Our 30-pallet combination twin-steer single trailer is 62 tonnes a more typical B-double rating.”
The first driveheads with the oil pumps were on trucks that were eventually moved on. In the workshop they never got to see how those new pumps went over their lifetime.
Even so, John is still curious to know.
“For those units we never got to see the trucks live their life out as we ended up selling them and we now have the first few brand-new trucks with the pumps on them,” he explains.
“Our advantage is we have our own workshop so if there’s an issue, say, with thrust washers, we do our own maintenance, regardless. We’ll do rebuilds even though there’s no changeover system offered on the driveheads today, it’s practically replaced straight away when you need a new one.”
John and his team will adjust the differential setting to change how the power is distributed to the drive wheels, which can affect grip and cornering behaviour.
“If we’ve got any seals leaking, we tend to it all inhouse with the support of Dana,” he says.
“If I’m not sure I ring them, and they give me the confidence or they give me the information, and they’ll let us know if they’re happy for us to do any work on it and then we do it with their blessing. They’re the people building them and we draw from their experience.”
Dana, as a key point of difference, are directly available to John to handle warranty claims, servicing, in general, timely advice.
“They do all the liaising and follow ups and describe what it is they’re going to do,” adds John.
“They make sure we’re happy. I don’t know if everyone else is like this, because in my experience they’re not, but I’m actually talking directly to them. Their backup is unbelievable.”
Dana has worked tirelessly in recent years to develop improvements to the durability of its new equipment in heavier specs so that they are not only certified but build repeatable.
One such product is the Dana D50-170, which can handle a heavier load rated at 130 tonnes. Lamattina’s have introduced it on six new trucks.
These are equipped with a Hendrickson suspension — the first time John has gone away from Kenworth’s eight bag suspension.
“We’ve been on the borderline of where Kenworth wanted us to be with the specification of the truck,” says John.
“The eight bag is only good for 107 tonnes while the Hendrickson Primaax Ex severe-duty rear air suspension is rated at 130 tonnes. Angelo [Lamattina], decided it was time to go heavier and that’s where the D50-170 product comes into its own.”
The axle housing wall of the Dana D50-170 is heftier making it a more robust option for lowering whole of life costs.
From the standpoint of managing a workshop, John can’t afford to mix and match different product SKUs when it comes to servicing, repairing and obtaining new parts.
“Initially, my worry was that I would need to run a whole different product,” says John.
“But the D50-170 is the exact same drivehead as the D46-170 only it is reinforced with a heavier duty housing. We’re excited to have the new product join the fleet and we’re keen to see how it goes in the heavier application.”
Moving increased loads consistent with the more-with-less-approach now synonymous with high productivity vehicles, brings a paradox to the table.
The aim of increasing whole of life while lessening the total cost of ownership when all is said and done must still hold up to empirical reality.
An engine defect gave John’s team an opportunity to make a discovery it might not have been able to learn from otherwise. Originally, they did rebuilds based on kilometres.
But in actual fact they realised it was going to be more advantageous to schedule rebuilds off the fuel burn.
“If you pull 107 tonnes for 700,000 kilometres it’s the same amount of fuel burn for a truck pulling a B-double for 900,000,” he says.
“It’s been under just as much load. It’s all about fuel burn when you think about how much load it has been under. Same thing for the diffs especially when they are each running on three different applications.”
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