Delivery of your Log Cabin

Please pass on our gratitude to the delivery driver. He did a great job and was very professional and well mannered. Many thanks from a satisfied customer.

Mr Carlton

Delivery & Offload

All of our delivery lorries are equipped with Moffat Mounty / Kooi fork lift trucks on board.

These are incredibly versatile machines, that allow the driver to offload the cabin packs from the side of the lorry, travel a short distance and place the pack as close to your build site as is possible.

Our Fork Lift trucks are known as ‘four way’, which means they have the ability of travelling forwards, backwards, to the left or to the right. This has a significant advantage if you consider that the cabin pack might be 6 metres long for example, spanning across the forks and if the fork lift could only travel forwards it would need a 6metre access width to get through! With the ability to travel sideways the length of pack becomes irrelevant and the fork lift with the pack needs just 2.5 metres of access width to travel through.

This makes easy work of some delivery situations such as when the lorry cannot get close to the property due to parked cars or narrow lane, in such cases the lorry simply parks remote from the property and the driver brings the packs along with the fork lift truck.

Often the site itself may have a long driveway or there is an access route to the rear of the property perhaps and again the fork lift truck comes up trumps in being able to deliver the packs as close as is practical to your actual build site. Our forklifts are fitted with large semi rough terrain tyres which can be essential in situations such as kerbs, steep inclines and rough ground.

Another significant benefit from this method of offloading is that the pack stays intact as a wrapped and banded package that may be left standing weather tight until you are ready to use it. Usually it has been delivered well off the road so as not to cause obstruction and temptation to tamper with it.

Our drivers are very experienced having delivered thousands of cabins over many years in all types of difficult conditions including and regularly in Central London, Cornish lanes and Scottish Highlands (they have even obliged to deliver to Marbella and South of France, really tough!) and still they remain the most pleasant, polite and helpful lorry drivers (logistic operations tacticians?) you are ever likely to meet. They are available for delivery from 0700 hrs to 2000 hrs often adaptable to suit a particular difficulty on site.

The offload operation is a one man job and whilst customers like to supervise if you cannot be there it doesn’t matter. Just remember to move the car out of the drive so it doesn’t get blocked in!

We consider our offload facility to be second to known and we are constantly told that our drivers are an asset to our company (which of course we already know).

How we compare

You will find that only a minority of log cabin suppliers have such superb offload facilities as us, in fact other than us ‘Keops Interlock’ and our complimentary supplier ‘Lugarde’ we are not aware of anyone else that does.

Some suppliers will operate vehicles with HIAB type cranes, which is still a one man operation but requires the lorry to be adjacent to the drop point and the materials can only be deposited kerbside or very close to the road, within the reach of the jib. It is common that poor slinging of the pack with the hoisting straps causes the package to crush at its sides and may cause damage to tongues and grooves of the wooden components if they were engaged when packed and subsequently forced to curve due to lifting forces.

The vast majority of suppliers rely on offloading by hand. What a job!!

You will need a team on standby and commonly it is not possible for the supplier to advise an accurate estimated time of arrival, so they may need to be standing around all day.

Then when it does arrive, often with a contract haulier, the driver will not help and will usually be in a rush to get away, leaving you with the challenge of offloading in record time, which does not allow you time to move materials to the build site, but instead you must pile them close by the lorry for speed and then double handle it all again when you carry it bit by bit to the build site.

Often this work is performed by novices in materials handling and with very little regard to the health and safety issues. Make no mistake, the risks of loads falling from the lorry when the banding is cut is very real, so too is the handling of unwieldy lengths of timber, lifting weight at full stretch and of course finger pinching, cuts, bruises and splinters are highly likely. Make sure your team is equipped with safety boots and hard hats and that you have public liability insurance in place.

The materials off loaded by this method lose their protection from the elements possibly causing discolouration, swelling and, if not restacked correctly and properly supported, the wood will take on all manner of curvatures and twists. However, some suppliers, who supply warped logs in the first place, rely on the excuse that the logs have not been stacked and stored properly by the purchaser, when you complain that it doesn’t fit together.

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