Air and Gas Industries’ latest tanker build, known as a ‘Panvac’, gets its name by combining a traditional Pantech-style truck body with an industrial liquid waste vacuum tanker.
The model, the first of three units being developed features a series of improvements on Air and Gas Industries’ previous builds to increase safety and offer greater payload.
“We have built these trucks before, but this is a bit of a special one that we did up,” says Air and Gas Industries Manufacturing Group Manager, Michael Fowler. “We’ve included a lot of features to make it very easy to load, easy to use, and to be very versatile.”
The vacuum tanker is made up by a 3,000-litre waste compartment, a 20-metre hydraulically operated vacuum hose reel to assist with speed of operation and a liquid ring vacuum pump system with a flow rate of 320 cubic metres per hour.
The tanker’s vessel is positioned between the front of the truck body and the back of the vehicle cab for optimum payload. To achieve this, Air and Gas Industries completed a weight distribution analysis to determine the vessel position and ensure that operators could use it to its limits.
During the design phase of the build, Air and Gas Industries put a lot of thought into the layout of the vehicle to make it more user friendly for the company’s liquid waste operations. This involved repositioning equipment mounted on the driver’s side of the vehicle to the passenger side, improving access to the top of the vessel and incorporating safety features such as handrail systems, anti-slip material and high visibility ladder treads.
The three new units, once they arrive, will be used for the collection of waste oil and transport of oil drums out of workshops and different facilities. In these tasks, Michael says the vacuum tanker will be a very flexible truck to allow Air and Gas Industries’ customer to support a range of different customers while minimising the number of returns to depots to unload.
“It’s all about giving them the most amount of payload,” he says. “We’re just trying to make sure they can maximise what they transport as much as possible. That’s what we put a lot of focus on, and we do it for all of our equipment.
“While we’re custom, we will always ensure that we size a vessel and position everything to optimise that particular vehicle regardless of what it is. That’s one of the benefits of being a custom builder – we can tweak all of those things locally and make it to suit our customers.”
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