LOUISVILLE, KY. Many times, new ideas come from unlikely places. That’s exactly what happened with Great Dane Trailers’ new CorroGuard exterior spray-on protectorant.
“Our trailer sandblasting booths take quite a beating, so we used a spray-on pickup truck bed liner on the walls to see if that could reduce the wear and tear on the bay’s interior,” Rick Mullinix, the company’s vp-engineering, told FleetOwner here at the Mid-America Trucking Show. “What we discovered is the spray-on liner held up very well, and then we asked ourselves: ‘Could we used something like this on our trailers?’”
The problem, said Mullinix, is protecting a trailer’s landing gear and underside from corrosion and rust. Trailer manufacturers use paint to create a barrier against corrosion, but paint is extremely fragile; rocks and other debris kicked up as a tractor-trailer rolls down the highway easily chips that paint away, leaving bare metal exposed to the elements.
CorroGuard is Great Dane’s solution to that problem: a thick, grainy thermoplastic elastomer coating that doesn’t chip or flake off when hit by debris. K. Adam Hilbish, a Great Dane sales representative, demonstrated the toughness of the CorroGuard concoction by shooting a piece of metal coated with the substance at close range with a .22 bullet full of birdshot at the show. While the birdshot discolored the CorroGuard material, it didn’t damage it – keeping its seal against the metal beneath intact.
Mullinix added that applying CorroGuard to a trailer’s landing gear and underside at the factory doesn’t add much time to the manufacturing process, so customers won’t need to wait longer for their trailers if they choose to have CorroGuard applied to their units.
