Construction Trucks And Equipment

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   I’ll start off by saying the CTE fuel and lube is the best looking on the market. As the owner I’m probably biased but as I go along here you’ll understand where I’m coming from. The CTE lube bed is an evolution of a bed designed by a long ago bankrupted Arizona company, and although at first glance they look similar the lube beds couldn’t be more different.

Let's start with the side profile, the first thing you will notice is that the bed and tank height are lower than the competition. CTE has designed our main fuel tank subframe to lower the top of the tank to closely match the cab roofline. This approach makes a more attractive truck and increases stability by lowering the fuel tank center of gravity. The under tank tool boxes have a sloped roof with the toolbox roofline matched to the bed floor line.

Although it greatly improves the appearance over our competitors flat top design the primary reason for the sloped roof is greater internal storage and drainage. Water and snow will not accumulate and eventually rust out the top of the cabinets. The CTE product tanks are between 4 and 6” shorter than competitive tanks , which gives us a smooth more attractive side profile as well as lowering the center of gravity to improve stability.

CTE lube beds are available with either single or dual rear aluminum roll-up doors. The single rear door covers the full width of the rear reel cabinet with a side entrance while the dual doors allow a rear center aisle walk up entrance. Over the years our competitors have debated back and forth the relative merits of each design. CTE takes the approach that we will let the customer decide which works best for them, CTE lube bodies are available with either configuration at no additional cost.

   When we first began building the CTE body we struggled to find the advertising buzzwords that define our product. We settled on RUGGED, RELIABLE, QUALITY as our slogan. Bluntly, that means that we build all our bodies as strong and simple as possible. I’ve always believed that good design has the fewest moving parts as possible, the more systems there are the more things there are to break or go wrong. Our hydraulic system is a case in point. We use a load sense pump and a simple steel hydraulic tank in a hydraulic system that contains approx. 40 gallons of hydraulic oil. Our competitors brag about their high-tech fan driven hydraulic oil cooler low volume system. I’ve never gotten too excited by the fan driven coolers for a number of reasons. First and foremost is if you design your system correctly and size the components correctly they aren’t needed. If the system doesn’t generate heat in the first place fans and coolers just become something else to break. Last but certainly not least is the fact that the fan driven cooling systems do not contain much oil therefore if the fan quits or an errand piece of paper plugs the cooler the system hydraulic temperatures skyrocket so quickly that major damage is done before the operator notices there is a problem and gets things shut down. The CTE system doesn’t have a fan to quit, a cooler to plug and has all of the systems balanced properly so that the simple hydraulic tank and 30 gal of oil dissipate the system heat. If something does go wrong you have to have a lot more oil mass to heat-up so you do not have instantaneous failures.

   While we are on the subject of hydraulics let me point out that all of the hydraulic pumps, both truck and product, on a CTE bed are located so that the pump suction port is below the oil tank level. One of the major causes of pump failure is inlet cavitation, which is eliminated with our flooded suction design. There are many other structure and component features that separate the CTE fuel and lube bed from the competition but we can summarize easily by saying that the CTE lube bed is designed to be as simple and reliable as possible while getting the job done for years and years to come.