At Hamilton, we don’t just keep things moving with our products; we tackle tricky challenges head-on.
When Toronto’s municipal water treatment facility faced a dilemma, the solution wasn’t just about wheels—it was about collaboration and custom engineering. This facility is no ordinary building; it’s a historical site. A little over a decade ago, the city of Toronto was mandated to stop dumping waste into Lake Ontario and instead build a massive subterranean structure to process the debris. But moving all that waste from underground posed a unique challenge—they couldn’t get fork trucks down there, and the roll-off bins used to haul the debris had to be rolled about 100 feet before they could be hooked up to the tugger trucks.
The bins are massive, with a 10,000-pound payload. Their steel wheels were tearing up the concrete floors, and the wheels themselves were disintegrating. Toronto needed new bins with much tougher, harder-working wheels. But when they reached out to the bin manufacturer, they could only handle the bin design, not the wheels themselves, which they claimed were too tricky to source. Toronto was left price shopping for custom wheels and were greeted with hefty prices…until they found Hamilton.
We dove into the challenge with glee. Our standard poly wheels couldn’t handle the payload requirement, so we custom-engineered 8.5” x 10” diameter wheels with polyurethane tread to protect the floors. We also crafted solid aluminum cores and special needle roller bearings to handle the weight and shock loading from debris slamming into the bins. It wasn’t a one-man job either. Hamilton worked closely with the bin manufacturer and our polyurethane supplier, bouncing designs back and forth to ensure everything came together flawlessly.
In the end, the collaboration resulted in custom wheels that exceeded expectations. "Hamilton was quite responsive, and their timelines were great. The wheels look really good," said Dennis Vibert, Area Supervisor at the City of Toronto.
Happy to turn sludge into solutions any day of the week.