Case Study: 120-Ton Truck Scale Installation for an Industrial Park in Shantou, China
Earlier this year, an industrial park in Shantou reached out to us with a problem a lot of manufacturing and logistics parks run into: their outbound material volume had grown to the point where relying on an external weighbridge just wasn't working anymore. Trucks were queuing offsite, drivers were making unnecessary round trips, and the park's management team had been wanting to install their own on-site scale for a while.
Project Overview
· Location: Industrial park, Shantou, Guangdong, China
· Scale specifications: 3×18 meters, 120-ton capacity
· Contractor: Fangda Weighing (Fujian Fangda), truck scale manufacturer
· Scope: site survey, foundation construction, scale installation, calibration, ongoing maintenance
Sizing the scale correctly
During the site survey, we found the park's traffic was mostly large trucks and semi-trailers, with a reasonable chance that vehicle sizes would increase over the next several years as operations scaled up. Instead of sizing the scale to current traffic only, we recommended 3×18 meters at 120 tons — enough headroom that the park wouldn't need to replace or upgrade the scale again in a few years. Oversizing costs more upfront, but undersizing usually costs more later.
Foundation work
The site was existing paved ground, so the pit had to be excavated from scratch. Before pouring, our crew ran a soil assessment and adjusted the rebar layout for the local ground conditions — the standard spec wasn't quite right for this soil type. The foundation was given close to two weeks of curing time, and we didn't compress that schedule. A truck scale is a 10-20 year piece of infrastructure; if the foundation isn't solid, sensor accuracy doesn't matter much down the line.
Installation and calibration
The scale deck uses a low-carbon steel structure. Since the site is near the coast, humidity and salt exposure were a real concern for long-term durability, so we used corrosion-resistant load cells rated for coastal climates rather than a standard inland spec. After installation, we calibrated using both certified test weights and repeated live-truck runs, and the final measurement error came in well within national tolerance standards.
A small issue during commissioning
On the second day of trial operation, the park reported occasional erratic readings on the indicator. Our technician was on-site the same day and traced it to construction dust that had gotten into the junction box and was interfering with the signal. We cleaned it out and added better dust sealing, and the issue hasn't recurred since. It wasn't a major fault, but we treat same-day response as non-negotiable — small wiring issues left unaddressed tend to turn into bigger sensor problems over time.
Results after going live
The scale has now been in operation for a little over three months. According to the park's logistics manager, average wait time per truck dropped from around 10-15 minutes down to just a few minutes. Inbound and outbound material tracking is also noticeably more accurate, and the warehouse and finance teams no longer run into the reconciliation mismatches that used to come up regularly.
