Staff at the Bridgestone Training Centre and MWheels have entered a joint CV wheel safety education programme for employees, customers and industry professionals. CVW finds out more.
This latest course uses both classroom learning and hands-on experience, to provide a full overview of CV wheel design and construction, fitting and general maintenance, plus an in-depth understanding of axles, nuts and threads as direct core components.
Based at the Horiba Motor Industry Research Association (Horiba MIRA) facility in Nuneaton, the Bridgestone Training Centre officially opened in January 2018 and has already seen over 125 professionals pass through its doors. Although it is perhaps best suited for tyre and bus technicians, those who attended ranged from staff responsible for checking vehicles to a wide variety of Bridgestone fleet customers, of which some are OE customers contracted to MWheels.
The centre has a custom-built trailer rig that allows for hands-on wheel security courses, and is an aspect to the course seldom found elsewhere.
Phil Thirsk, Training and Development Manager at Bridgestone UK, said, “The original relationship started in 2016 after I approached MWheels having seen a lot of articles about wheels and wheel safety, so I wanted to know more to see if what we were delivering on training was still relevant, which, as it turns out, it was.
“In May of this year, we again met to discuss wheel security and the possibility of me doing some training for staff and for one of their largest fleet customers, to which I readily agreed. It was then they introduced their ten-point check list and I agreed to use it in my training and issue it as a course hand out.”
Mark Carpenter, Health and Safety Quality and Training Manager for Universal Tyres and Autocentres, which covers the South East Region, described his experience of the training: “I went on the course about a year ago. As an experienced industry practitioner it reiterated all the basics, which is always useful. For new entrants, however, it is ideal, simply because it covers absolutely everything relating to wheels. I now train our team here – consisting of about a dozen technicians at any given time – and as per the course, I state exactly what damage and defects need to be looked for when checking CV wheels.”
The wheel safety information has been selected from MWheels’ extensive technical library, details from which came to the fore in its successful lobbying and input into the EU Roadworthiness Directives and recent positive meeting with the Department for Transport.
MWheels’ popular white paper – ‘Evaluating commercial vehicle wheel safety – how to keep safe and stay compliant’ – is available to download here.
