Illinois Fontaine Dealer

ILoca Services is your Illinois Fontaine Dealer!
Fontaine Trailer Company is the world’s largest manufacturer of flatbed truck trailers. Well known among fleets and owner operators, Fontaine has for more than 60 years built a strong reputation for exceptional quality, the most reliable performance, the best warranty and the highest resale value in the industry.
The company’s product line includes flatbed, drop-deck, extendable and lowbed trailers. Flat and drop-deck trailers are manufactured in Fontaine plants in Haleyville and Jasper, Alabama, with specialty trailers manufactured in plants in Springville, Alabama, Kent, Ohio and Princeton, Kentucky.
For Fontaine, innovation in the trailer business is continuous. Product improvements are driven by customer requests, by the requirements of transportation regulatory agencies, or from internal needs for business process improvement. Maintaining the legendary quality and brand character is a primary concern. “There are many ways to design and build a trailer,” says Harold Painter, senior designer and systems manager at Fontaine. “Whatever we change, we have to maintain the well-designed and well-built qualities of our products – it’s what distinguishes us from competitors.”
Fontaine uses the NX® digital product development system from Siemens PLM Software as a key design engineering tool. “We model our trailers to the last detail in solids, and we have done so since solid modeling tools were introduced in the system,” Painter explains. “From the solid models, NX produces drawings, bills of material and DXF output that goes directly to CNC burning machines for manufacturing our main beams. All of that data comes directly from the solid model, so there is little manual work or data re-entry, and no chance of introducing errors.”
NX includes tools that are particularly helpful to Fontaine, including the weld assistant and interpart expressions. Because assembly of the company’s products involves many welding processes, Fontaine takes advantage of NX’s weld modeling tools that streamline the design of joining features and the representation of welds on drawings, in compliance with international weld annotation standards.
Flat bed truck trailers are actually not flat – they are constructed with a front-to-rear arch that flattens under full loads. Modeling the trailer assembly with the arch would be difficult or impractical, because most of the components, like side rails and floor sills, are rectilinear. Fontaine creates trailer models in NX in the flat state, but ties the flat model to a sketch and model of the arched trailer with inter-part expressions that maintain the associative relationships in the digital model.
Visit www.iloc.sikichdevelopment.com for New and Used Fontaine Trailers!