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LOAD IN SAFETY EQUIPMENT • FORT VALE’S SAFELOAD COUPLER HAS BECOME AN INDUSTRY STANDARD. TO GET THERE HAS TAKEN HARD WORK, ATTENTION TO DETAIL AND PRIDE IN THE FINISHED PRODUCT THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION of ‘valve’ is as follows: “a device for controlling the passage of fluid or air through a pipe, duct, etc, especially an automatic device allowing movement in one direction only”. That seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, and especially so in the world of fuel transfer. Fort Vale was founded in 1967 by Edward S Fort OBE, manufacturing parts for the road tanker industry. The first premises were in Colne, Lancashire and the first product was a 2.5-inch cast iron, three-way valve for tankers supplying heating oil to residential properties. In 1967 Fort Vale sold 150 valves;
50 years later, it sold 150,000. The chief reason for this growth is the development of the Safeload range of API bottom loading couplers. First developed more than 20 years ago, the market-leading Safeload range is the first choice for many oil majors and the expanding range of Safeload products for the petroleum transfer industry now includes loading arm systems as well as four different types of couplers. Now in its fourth iteration, the Safeload range embodies the Fort Vale culture of quality, design excellence and safety - it’s solid, it’s dependable, and is a regular but unspectacular fixture on the company sales
chart. But for the terminal customers that use them, the Safeload is a prized asset, as Fort Vale’s business development manager Jonathan Parker explains. “A big part of my professional life (before the pandemic) was attending shows and talking to customers and competitors,” Parker says. “When your customers praise products, it’s always nice, but when your competitors say the same, you know you’ve got something special. I’m fortunate in that I’ve been with Fort Vale a long time and I know the Safeload range inside out. When we began the initial design process all those years ago, the brief was to produce a coupler that would deliver the most secure connection with minimum wear to the truck adaptor, and that would be reliable and very-long lasting within the service conditions of a road-loading terminal.” TRIED AND TESTED “We understood the rigours of the relentless usage required in the terminal environment,” Parker continues. “The product had to be robust, reliable and have been extensively tested well in excess of industry requirements, to ensure that they would be hard working, long lasting and require low maintenance. “Thorough testing was of paramount importance. Initially, Fort Vale had intended to mimic an estimated operational working life based on one operation every twenty minutes, over a constant 24-hour day for five years (equalling 131,400 cycles). But in fact, the test continued to 250,000 cycles, which represents ten times the number of cycles called for in BS EN13083. The coupler was connected, opened, pressurised with fluid for a set period of time, closed and then disconnected. A counter was affixed to the coupler to automatically record the number of connections. On completion of the 250,000 cycles, the coupler was found to be leak-free at the MAWP and there was no significant wear or damage to any of the parts. “It’s one of the main reasons that we are so confident in the product that we are able to offer a three-year guarantee for it - something that none of our competitors are able to do,”
HCB MONTHLY | FEBRUARY 2021
