Two engineering projects completed this week by Express Trailers, continue to confirm the company's resourcefulness and versatility. These past months have been particularly busy for the team of around 25 employees who work in Express Trailers' engineering and servicing section whose work culminated last weekend with the completion of a side-loader and a container stacker.
The restored and re-conditioned HAMMAR side-loader was shipped by Express Trailers this weekend to Las Palmas in Gran Canaria on behalf of world-class side-loader manufacturer HAMMAR Maskin of Sweden who contracts Express Trailers with the reconditioning of such side-loaders. The other project was the reconditioning of a container stacker, a process that took seven months to complete, and which will now see this vehicle deployed by Express Trailers at the Malta Freeport.
"These two projects confirm the talent, the commitment and the passion with which our people have worked incessantly over the past months to see these two projects through," said Franco Azzopardi, chairman and CEO of Express Trailers.
"We are proud of our team and it is thanks to their resourcefulness that Express Trailers has been able to expand its operations and venture into new business opportunities such as the business collaboration with the Swedish company HAMMAR, a global seller of side-loaders with whom we have been working for the past 15 years," Azzopardi added.
Engineering and mechanical work have always been ingrained in Express Trailers' identity of a family business where family members always contributed their own expertise to bring their ideas to fruition. These two recently completed projects recall the roots of a company which always met its engineering requirements in-house as Bastjan Vella, one of the eight Vella brothers recalls.
"After completing a three-year City & Guilds course I became a qualified mechanic; my job was in our garage servicing and fixing our vehicles and equipment. In fact, whatever we could build ourselves, we built," says Bastjan Vella who although retired, still visits the yard every day to help by lending his experience to his equally able successor Noel Vella supported by his team of tradesmen.
"I remember when my brother Żaren had spotted an old Coventry fork lifter. Half of its parts were missing; it was an old truck so replacing these parts with new ones was practically impossible. However, we bought it just the same, I managed to re-assemble it, and we started working with it too. Eventually, I also built a cart for this fork lifter which enabled us to transport this fork lifter to where we needed to work. Moreover, when increasing business required a bigger truck, we came across an old Leyland Hypo 8 Wheeler which we bought. I fixed it and made it operational again and we built a platform for it so that we could load it with containers. Whatever we could do ourselves, we did!"