Truck stairs are foldable, mountable step systems attached to the underside or rear of flatbed trailers. They give drivers and freight handlers a stable way to climb onto and descend from the deck instead of using a wheel hub or jumping down. They're built for anyone who works around a trailer all day: drivers securing loads, warehouse crews doing inspections, fleet maintenance staff checking tie-downs and cargo. The client needed a lightweight system that any rig owner could install without specialized equipment, deploy or stow in seconds, and rely on in demanding trailer-yard conditions. We worked to solve for the people actually using the steps, not just the spec sheet: a design light enough to install by hand, fast enough to not slow down a stop, and strong enough to trust with a 400-pound load.
The project arrived at Daedalus as a CAD model from the client. While the underlying mechanism for how the access steps opened and closed had already been designed, the interactions between the many moving members still needed to be worked out, and real actuators capable of meeting the client's performance requirements had yet to be selected. That gap between a finished-looking drawing and a buildable product is where a lot of our engineering work actually happens. The biggest engineering challenge was the specification requiring the steps to deploy and stow within seven seconds. The team began with linear actuators, as originally specified, but found them too slow and too costly. By using a hydraulic pump and cylinder system, we easily met the seven-second deploy and stow requirement at a substantially lower cost. The second-hardest task was achieving a 400-pound weight capacity. This required finite element analysis (FEA) of the structural members to confirm the design was strong enough while remaining light enough to meet the target weight, a constraint that greatly mattered to the users because the product was intended to be purchased and installed by anyone without heavy lifting equipment. The client was very pleased with the outcome, and the resulting design was later acquired by Multimatic, a Canadian company specializing in aftermarket trucking equipment. The truck and trailer access system is now marketed to fleet owners and operators as a power-deploy solution that meets OSHA and ISO ergonomic standards while reducing fall risk and installation burden.