Logistics

Cart with plastic chassis

For the German company Cordes GmbH, BPO developed a cart with a plastic chassis for the transport of mail. Swiss Post will use the cart for transport of mail in and between distribution centres.

Existing carts are generally completely made of steel. The use of plastics instead of steel offers many advantages: lower weight means lower transportation costs, the unit cost of a cart is less and the injection molded plastic chassis offers easy repair due to it’s modular design.

The cart is designed for severe conditions in use and applies to extensive requirements like high impact resistance by fork-lifts and collision with walls, low temperatures, interfacing with other parts of the logistics system and the transport at of very different types of goods like crates, mailbags and letters without any secondary packaging.

To enable representative testing a series of 50 carts was built. These carts have a HDPE chassis produced with compact injection molding in an aluminium mold. The complete test series is built within 9 weeks including the milling of the mold and the injection molding process. The carts have been in use by Swiss Post in order to evaluate the design.