An exclusive feature from MOTORINDIA
MAHA India Automotive Testing Equipment Private Ltd., established in October 2010, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of MAHA Maschinenbau Haldenwang GmbH & Co. KG, a leading manufacturer of high quality vehicle safety testing and lifting equipment for more than 40 years. The company is vigorously working towards becoming the preferred supplier of vehicle testing equipment in the country.
MAHA India is also a distributor of TruckCam’s truck wheel alignment products in India and in other markets, including Sri Lanka and Brazil. TruckCam is a Swedish company specializing in alignment systems for commercial vehicles and is the only manufacturer of complete alignment solutions for commercial vehicle manufacturing process and for OE dealers.
With the commercial vehicle segment offering huge requirements, the company is focussed on truck / bus manufacturers and its OE dealers and is confident of establishing its name, especially with its wheel alignment solutions and other testing equipment, including side slip testers, roller brake testers, headlight testers, speedometer testers & chassis dynamometers, and lifting equipment such as mobile column lifts & pit jacks.
The basis of wheel alignment currently in use in the industry is the thrust angle principle which works well for passenger cars but does not hold good for trucks. For trucks, the principle of chassis centre-line based wheel-alignment has proved to be a far superior method.
Alignment is carried out in various stages of manufacturing process.
Axle Alignment System ensures precise Toe and Max-Turn setting for steerable axles in axle assembly stage itself. Caster influence in the truck will also be automatically compensated.
Rear axle alignment system ensures maintaining the main driven axle exactly 90o to the chassis frame ‘out-of-square’. To align the main driven axle correctly already at assembly stage will prevent the difficult job of realignment on a completed truck.
Axle parallelity system measures parallelism of other axles using main driven axle as reference and also measures straight ahead position of the front axle. End-of-line alignment system measures all alignment angles in less than three minutes. With alignment being carried out in manufacturing process, the end-of-line becomes mere quality check station.
MAHA India has supplied its end-of-line unit to Volvo Buses, which represented the company’s first breakthrough. The company has also supplied end-of-line units to Daimler India and VE Commercial Vehicles and will soon be installed in AMW. It has installed its axle alignment system at American Axle’s Chennai plant, and another axle alignment system will soon be installed at the AMW facility in Bhuj.
It is interesting to note that the principle of chassis centre-line based wheel-alignment is introduced for the OE dealers and tyre dealers. After-market wheel alignment system enjoys global approvals from Daimler, Volvo, Scania and MAN. The company is aiming for big success in the after-market as well.
“We are keen on proving our products through technology and innovation. We will stick to our expertise and will not go for horizontal expansion”, says Mr. Rengarajan, Director, MAHA India.