I’ve been with Bludot for 30 years. Brake lines have not changed that much over the past 30 years. We have served hundreds of companies over this time and have pretty much seen every brake line problem and solution out there. The biggest change we have made is the advent of an automated machine to run faster batches of tubing in custom lengths to expedite our customers’ orders. The automation took away a couple of processes and replaced two of our employees that retired so it has sped the process up a lot. We can now fulfill orders in three to five days. Three to five days on stock items, five to seven days on custom orders.
We’ve been building custom sub-assembly kits for OEMs and distributors as long as I’ve been with the company. OEMs and manufacturers of trailers from marine and boat trailers, to military and cargo trailers, can benefit from this kitting process for sub-assembly. Pre-packaged kits allow our OEM customers to streamline their assembly lines by eliminating sub-assembly stations and consolidating parts purchasing to one supplier instead of many.
Now, after the COVID thing for three or four months, business is picking up again and orders are starting to increase to help catch them up from where they were before it started. We never shut down because we were designated an essential business because of the public service and military trailer builders we supply.
Custom bending has been one of our specialties for many years. These bends are all based on the drawings and specifications from the customer. We make a prototype, we send it to the customer, once they receive the prototype and approve or make changes, that then results in a working template. We count on each company’s engineers to supply us with the specifications for each custom bent brake line. The tubing can be bent on the line, it bends fairly easily, it does not kink easily, but OEMs can save time by having us bend it here. Many customers purchase straight tubing or coil from us and do it themselves.
We do have some limitations on bends in that we can only do one-inch radius bends with our tooling. Our bender is a semi-automatic bender so each piece is done against a preprogrammed “recipe” to ensure the exact angle. But many customers still take advantage of bending services to make the assembly process easier. Most of our bending customers that build many of the same trailers over and over, such as some of our military trailer manufacturers, benefit from stocking pre-bent lines. They have produced the same trailers for many years. Recently a company employed our custom bending services after purchasing another trailer firm and they were looking to make the new assembly line more efficient.
We really can’t understand why our copper-nickel brake lines are not selling better. It is just a little more expensive than our AG (Aluminum Galfan) brake lines but more affordable than our stainless steel brake lines. But our stainless steel customers are stuck on stainless, and that is good for us, but they could really save some money and hassles by using copper-nickel. Most of our quotes are going from the AG lines to copper and there are not many takers.
They should understand that copper-nickel has been used by the European automakers since the 1970s. It is easier to bend, flare, it’s more pliable to work with, and it has about the same corrosion protection as stainless steel lines. We continue to push copper-nickel as an upgrade to AG and a more affordable and easy-to-assemble alternative to stainless steel lines.
We’ve been providing trailer manufacturers and distributors with brake line kits ready for assembly since day one. Everything you need to hydraulically plumb a brake line on a trailer is included in these kits. One unit comes in one bag basically. If they are running 100, 7-wide by 14-long cargo trailers that month, they can have 100 kits ready for production. Just pull it out of the bag, uncoil it and straighten it out, make the bends, install it and send it down the line. All the kits are provided to the customers’ specifications. Once they create a kit with us it stays in the system until they run 7-by-14s again. Some of our customers have been ordering the same kits since I started here 30 years ago. Our quality is very good and our lead times are excellent. That’s what’s kept us rolling for over 45 years. Contact us and get your custom brakes today.