When the Doubleday Garage in Jersey was faced with EU health & safety regulations that would prevent it from selling petrol, British Turntable came to the rescue by designing and supplying a manually operated car turntable for a newly created forecourt at the St Helier site.

The problem for Doubleday occurred when the new regulations outlawed the serving of fuel over a pavement. The 5 metre diameter, 4 tonne capacity manually operated turntable recommended by British Turntable has revolutionised the business. In this very unusual use for a car turntable, drivers simply park their vehicle on the revolve in front of the petrol pump; a Doubleday petrol attendant then fills the car with the required amount of fuel and pushes the car round so that the driver can exit the forecourt safely in a forwards direction. The effort required is minimal.

Roz Petch, joint owner of Doubleday, explains: “When the new regulations hit it wasn’t too difficult to create a new forecourt back off the pavement, although this did require taking half the roof off the old building and constructing a new wall to separate the petrol pumps from the repair shop.

“There wasn’t the room for a turning circle, however, and we were still faced with the problem of having cars driving into the forecourt but having to reverse out onto what can be a busy road.

“We’d seen a driveway turntable in action, and at one time there’d been a much larger turntable installed in a bus depot in a cul-de-sac just down the road that enabled buses to be turned round safely. We realised that if a bus could be turned round in this way there shouldn’t be a problem for our customers’ vehicles! A call to British Turntable was all it took to get the right unit for us. The turntable works a treat and has helped us get the business back on track.”

The car turntable designed for Doubleday was adapted from a standard, flexible design that allowed British Turntable to tailor the unit to comply with forecourt safety regulations. This type of revolve is used in multi-occupancy residential and office blocks and other commercial buildings to create better parking facilities in restricted areas; externally, for which the turntable is fully weather- and vandal-proofed, it has been developed to provide easy-to-use car wash facilities and, again, for car parking where space is at a premium.

Larger capacity revolves using mechanical or air film technology are available for HGV and PSV use.