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HUGHES EQUIPMENT, like many companies in the truck equipment business, isn't easy to characterize.
The Mount Vernon, Ohio, company clearly is a truck equipment distributor. But a recent tour of the company's shop showed just how much custom truck body manufacturing has taken over in the three years the company has been in operation.
"My background is in truck body manufacturing, and I started the company with the idea of being a custom truck body manufacturer," says Todd Hughes, owner of Hughes Equipment. "But truck equipment was critical to us because it gave us the cash flow we needed to get started, and it helped us smooth out our workloads. Plus, it provides us with products that we can't build nearly as easily as we can buy them."
Having a couple of truck body lines to distribute is also important because they form the basis of some of the custom truck bodies the company sells. For these types of jobs, Hughes Equipment can start with service bodies from Stahl or flatbeds from Blue Ridge Manufacturing and convert them to custom bodies that are too specialized to be built on a high-volume manufacturer's assembly line.
"We buy what we can and build what we can't," Hughes says.
The most popular body that Hughes Equipment produces is the hauler body-a platform with a gooseneck hitch and underbody storage compartments.
"These have generated a good bit of response," Hughes says, "especially from the horse market. We displayed at a horse show in Columbus recently and sold several."
The emphasis on truck body manufacturing is certainly understandable for someone with Todd Hughes' background. He spent a major portion of his career at Stahl, first as engineering manager and then as product manager for Stahl's SST trailer. He served as plant manager of the company's Cardington, Ohio, facility...