Accessorizing the fleet

Service Truck Magazine “Spec My Truck” August / September 2023

La Plata Electric Association, Inc. of Durango, Colorado, worked with Summit Truck Bodies to combine the economy of a “standard” service body with custom features designed for the way La Plata’s crews use their trucks.

“We’ve got 30 trucks in our fleet,” explained Toby Allred, La Plata’s Line Manager. “Ten of them are crew trucks. We added three Ford F550s with Summit service bodies in 2022 and have another one ordered for 2023. Keeping them all the same brand helps our shop’s mechanics standardize the parts they need to keep for maintenance and repairs.”

Allred ordered La Plata’s 2021 F-550s, each with a 6.7-liter turbo diesel engine and a 10-speed automatic transmission. The chassis of each vehicle was outfitted with an 11-foot Summit service body that came with LED exterior accessory lights and LED strip lights inside the compartments.

Summit Drawer Systems drawer sets ride in the front compartment on the passenger side since crews must often access tools while the trucks are parked on the side of the road. Adjustable shelving provides storage in all other compartments.

The trucks all came with two inverters: a 3,000-watt unit in the compartment over the left rear wheel that will “run a 120-volt drill or power tool,” and a second inverter wired into the trucks’ cabs to power laptops and other accessories.

Allred and Summit salesman Nick Schafer teamed up to customize the standard service bodies specific to La Plata Electric’s needs.

“We had some racks on our other trucks that had worked well for us,” said Allred. “Summit came and took pictures, then worked with us to add the racks and other things to the bodies.”

A full-width basket of expanded metal sits over the front of the beds and carries spare wire and bulky, infrequently used sup- plies. The front of each basket is equipped with a high-intensity Golight spotlight.

“The spotlights are remote-controlled by Bluetooth from the cab,” related Michael Messier, a Line Foreman who runs one of the new crew trucks.

Messier continued: “There’s a control to swivel the lights up, down, and side-to-side, even 360 degrees. They’re really nice when you’re driving at night, trying to find the cause of an outage, and then once you’re working on a problem, you can focus light at the base or the top of a pole, wherever you’re working.”

La Plata’s customized racks include a body-length expanded metal tray on top of the driver-side compartments designed to carry eight-foot-long cross arms and long gear. Heavy-duty hooks hang from each rack’s upper rail to carry rope, wire, and frequently used but bulky accessories. A job box provides weather-tight storage of large tools and gear at the front of the Line-X Ultimate-coated center bay.

Allred specified a two-foot-long step bumper on the back of the service bodies, each equipped with a vise.

“It makes a nice workbench for the guys,” noted Allred. “There are doors on each side of the bumper, so there’s full- width storage for digging bars and long tools inside the bumper.”

A small door between the bed of the body and the top of the bumper/workbench provides access to weather-tight storage for the nine-foot-long fiberglass hot sticks used for working on live circuits.

“Those have to be stored out of the weather,” said Messier. “We had them install five sections of PVC pipe under the bed from front to rear. The hot sticks slide in those tubes real nice.”

The compartment over the right rear wheel is the safety compartment on all the trucks. First aid supplies and an AED (automated external defibrillator) for jump-starting hearts are stored in the same clearly labeled location on all of La Plata’s service trucks.

Careful consideration and practical experience have helped La Plata’s crews fine-tune their trucks to fit their needs and the way they work. But, according to Allred, there are always things to consider when ordering future units.

“We’ve mounted some sections of pipe vertically on the racks so we can store shovels and handled tools upright and keep them off the floor of the bed,” summed up Allred. “And we discovered that the newer extended-cab F-550s end up having a 184- inch wheelbase, which, with the 11-foot service body and two-foot bumper, is a really long truck to have to turn around on narrow roads.

“In the future, we’ll probably order trucks with a shorter wheelbase and a nine- foot service body. There’s so much storage space in the Summit bodies that we’ll get along fine even with the shorter bodies.”