We already build to spec rather than to catalogue: cylinder packages by material density, leaf packs by coil weight, tank and pump by duty. Tell us the duty.
"Custom" in this trade usually means a paint colour and a badge. Here it means the parts of the vehicle that decide whether it survives your duty, and three examples are worth giving because they are what we do on ordinary orders rather than special ones.
Cylinder packages on tippers are sized to material density and road condition. Standard load on the side tipper is one pair of 120 mm five-stage cylinders plus four 110 mm four-stage; overload and heavy-overload packages exist and are specified against the actual duty. We ask what you haul and where before quoting, not afterwards.
Leaf packs on the coil trailer are selected by coil weight. Packs of 4, 7, 8, 10 or 13 leaves. A pack sized for general freight will settle and fatigue under coil work, so we size it rather than send you the standard one.
Water tankers are configured rather than picked. We publish no capacity list, because tank size is decided by your water source, your route and your duty cycle. The five questions on that page are the specification process.
None of these is an upcharge for being awkward. They are how a special purpose vehicle is properly sold.
A tender is a specification written by someone who has to be able to compare answers, which means it is usually more prescriptive than it needs to be and occasionally prescriptive about the wrong things.
What we do with one: read it against what we build, and come back with three lists — what we meet as standard, what we can meet with a change we will describe, and what we cannot meet. The third list is the one that matters and the one most suppliers leave out until it is too late to help you.
What we will not do: answer "compliant" to a clause we have not verified. If a clause requires evidence we do not hold — a specific test report, a destination-market approval — we will say so, and say whether it is obtainable and roughly what that would involve.
That is more useful at bid stage than an unqualified yes.
A fleet standard is different from a tender: it is a living document, it exists to keep a workshop's life simple, and most of it is about commonality rather than performance.
What tends to matter most: brake and axle components you already stock, lighting and electrical to a pattern your fitters know, coupling heights matching your existing tractors, and paint and marking to your scheme.
What tends to matter least, despite being written down: frame dimensions specified to a millimetre where a range would do, and component brands specified where an equivalent would serve.
Send us the standard and we will mark it up: met, met with a substitution we will name, or not met. Then you decide which of the mismatches you actually care about.
Five things, and with them a quotation is arithmetic rather than guesswork.
1. What you haul — material, density, and whether it is abrasive or sticky.
2. How it is loaded and unloaded — crane, forklift, tipped, from the side or the rear.
3. The road — surface, gradient, and what it is like at its worst rather than on average.
4. Your legal limits — combination mass and axle limits in the country of operation.
5. Quantity and destination port.
If you have a drawing or a fleet standard, send that instead and we will work from it.
We do not publish a lead time in days for non-standard work, and we would rather explain why than print a figure.
A non-standard build has a setup cost that is paid once regardless of quantity, and a schedule position that depends on what else is on the line when you commit. Those two together mean the honest answer varies by more than any published figure could usefully cover — a run of forty of one configuration and a run of four of ten configurations are not the same job even at the same total quantity.
What drives it, so you can estimate before we quote: how far the build departs from a line we already run, how many distinct configurations are in the order, whether any long-lead component is specified by brand, and where the batch falls in the schedule.
Send the specification and the quantity and we will give you a schedule for your order that we will hold to — rather than a catalogue figure that changes the moment the order is real.
