Sarum Hydraulics were cheered to see a hydraulic drill bolted on the back of a reindeer sledge for a rather sensible way of taking ice cores in the Arctic. Being December, our thoughts quickly turned to Christmas, and how we could give a tech makeover to Santa’s dashing, if not slightly archaic, sleigh. The old guy seems very reluctant to move with the times!

For a remodel of the structure of the sleigh and a shift away from cumbersome wood to a composite cell formula usually reserved for the BMW i3, Sarum Hydraulics would give the boys at Cecence a call.  Given that he must visit every house on the planet we all know Saint Nick needs all the space he can get, so for an optimised composite structure featuring a large load space, there really is no one better.

As a company, we do have some reservations about Kris Kringle’s need for enhanced driver safety. We have no doubts regarding his core competence as he has been doing the job a good while, but there has been an anecdotal history of driving under the influence. The operative does always appear very red faced, jolly and says “ho, ho, ho” a lot.

Manual handling regulations are a big issue even on very specialist public service vehicles. We would drop the parcel bay hydraulically by moving the sledge runners. We think that a miniature power pack running on a decent sized pack of Li-ion rechargeables would cope with the heavy usage on the one night. The operative would get an optimum flow of parcels in and out of the load space even with massive variation in sizes, non conforming address labelling and distracting metallic or bright coloured external packing.

the snowman

The inherited design of the sledge always seems to us to struggle to cope with heavy and awkward landings which gives the concern of catastrophic failure of the structure when you are working to a tight schedule. We would use miniature gas/oil struts from Horstman in Bath, allowing the damping to be tuned for the job. The support team would keep a Sarum Hydraulics Micropac oiling/charging unit back at the depot, providing minimal hand load even for a 5 percentile individual. With modular design, Micropac hydraulic oiling, charging and testing units are built to do exactly what the customer wants.

Sarum Hydraulics knows Christmas comes every day for users of our hydraulic kit. You might be too late to place an order with Saint Nick, but our shop is always open. Visit us at www.sarum-hydraulics.co.uk to find out more.