Knapheide has released a video on YouTube showing its new all-aluminum gooseneck flatbed being put to work on a farm.
Bleigh Farms Manager Aaron Ball states during the roughly 3-minute clip that the aluminum bed holds up to the corrosive materials handled daily on the farm.
The lighter bed, which is currently listed in Knapheide’s catalog, weighs about 40 percent less than a steel version and is constructed with aerospace technology utilizing military-grade aluminum extrusions.
While no dramatic drop test is shown in the video, Knapheide told Hard Working Trucks that it’s conducted its own block-drop test, similar to the one Chevy used last year in its highly publicized truck bed challenge against Ford’s F-150 aluminum bed.
“We’ve done the same thing. We’ve taken a bucket full of cinder blocks and dropped them on there,” said Knapheide’s Tony Marshall, manager of product strategy and marketing.
“We’ve done even more crude testing where we’ve tried to see what it’s going to take to cause this thing to fail. We had our biggest guy truly swing an ax and we finally got into it. All day long, we expect these things to hold well just as anything else.”
