Time to sharpen your lift truck selection skills

In past blogs and webcasts we’ve talked with lift truck market experts who believed that fleet managers would hang onto their underutilized trucks longer and put off purchasing new equipment. Fine. That will save money in the short run. But eventually you’ll have to buy a new truck.

Vendors want to make sure that their customers who have been out of the new truck market for quite a while will get up to speed on the art of lift truck specification. Take the workhorse of lift trucks, for example, sit-down counterbalanced models. If you’re thinking of buying one soon, make sure you know your application inside and out.

• Consider capacities, not just at the lower heights but at the lift heights.
• What do your lift truck operators do in their daily work that’s different from years past? Are they getting off the truck more frequently? Why? Are they positioning and wrapping loads? Filling out paperwork? Picking up debris?
• Are your current trucks equipped with the right tools or attachments to get the job done?
• Do operators need more visibility?
• Are operators working in tighter spaces?

The answers to these questions will help you decide if a sit-down or a stand-up counterbalanced lift truck makes more sense.

Andy Smith, Crown marketing product manager for Class 1 trucks, told me of a 3PL customer that needed to purchase some new trucks but they were already working with mis-applied equipment.

“Their current trucks were 4,000 pound 3-wheel counterbalanced trucks,” he said. “We visited the operations and found the maximum load they had to lift to height, 180 inches, was 1,500 pounds. Does a 4,000 pound truck really make sense in that application? We didn’t think so. Also with the space requirements they had, a shorter truck would have worked better.”

One of the problems people think about in going to a lower capacity and shorter lift truck is sacrificing stability. Smith noted that there are 3,000 pound capacity trucks with shorter battery boxes that maintain the same intrinsic stability as higher capacity trucks.

The size and power of the battery is often overlooked by lift truck buyers. Craig Curtis, product manager of counterbalanced trucks for The Raymond Corporation, reminds that the size of the battery and the amp hours you can attain should be linked to the capacity of the truck. In the sit-down world, he told me, the two main capacity ranges are 2000-3500 pounds and 5000 pounds and up. The 5000 pound trucks have battery boxes from 26 to 32 inches. That means you can get a battery in there with over 1200 amp hours. The smaller trucks have a battery box of 20 to 25 inches long.

“If a client doesn’t know what his duty cycle is, I can see how you can get a mis-match and not be able to go a full shift,” he said. His advice?

“Sit-down counterbalanced trucks are excellent for long travel but if you work a lot in the dock area it may not be the best truck for those situations,” he concludes. “That’s where a standup truck or pallet truck might be better.”

Sure, lift trucks are workhorses, but putting your money on the wrong one for the job could be a losing proposition.

Tom Andel
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