A milestone at Mills-Tui has seen the Rotorua manufacturer deliver its 50th Hino 500 Series water tanker to Fire & Emergency New Zealand (FENZ).

The specialist trucks are built to the FENZ 4x2 Medium Water Tanker specification and are deployed throughout New Zealand.

“Fifty is a bit of a milestone for us,” says Mills-Tui Managing Director Dean Purves.

“We won the tender and started in 2018, turning them out at the rate of about 10 per year since then – although Covid and some supply issues did slow things down a bit for a while.

“Hino look after the cab-chassis and all of the wiring and we do the body build and the equipment fit out,” Dean says.

“The FENZ requirements are very prescriptive. We had to meet their specification and design requirements, which includes being able to carry 5700-litres of water. Our design holds 5800-litres in a baffled alloy tank.”

Other features on the FENZ builds include side lockers, a rear loading hose locker, dam locker, portable pump, provision for ladder storage, an additional pump storage on a slide out tray along with Code 3 and Hella lights.

There have been some minor design changes implemented early in the programme.

“The first three or four were fairly bare bones and then we added a hose rack, a first aid kit, and some ladder storage and we also moved the suction hose locker to a new position within the body,” Dean says.

The 50th Medium Water Tanker build was displayed on the Mills-Tui stand at the recent Bombay Truck Show.

Mills Tui have a firm footprint in the fire and emergency sector.

“We have recently built some new Incident Support Vehicles for FENZ, and we’ve also built fire appliances for some private forest owners,” Dean says.