Outside the warehouse cube, there’s still the need to move palletised loads and put them on trucks, without quite as much pressure on space. (Ultimately, top-down automated robots like AutoStore may prove to be the end-game for this particular arms race.) The impetus for these design types is a relentless drive to maximise storage space, usually indoors, to give the warehouse operator the opportunity to put aisles closer together and store or earn as much as possible from within his cube. In time, and with advances in design and materials, manufacturers were able to develop trucks with strong enough axles and heavy enough counterweights (a lump of weight at the back) that enabled higher and heavier lifting capacities.įast forward to the modern day and we have skinny forklifts for narrow warehouse aisles with masts that reach out (Reach Trucks), stand up ones that have tiller arms instead of wheels (Pallet Trucks and Stackers), wire guided ones that take the operator up with them (man-up VNA, the VNA standing for Very Narrow Aisle), shorter ones with heavy batteries acting as a counterweight (3-wheel electrics) and even bendy ones that pivot in the middle (Articulating VNA). That’s because they weren’t being used in high bay racking, mostly to load a lorry bed, there was no need for overhead protection as the loads were kept low to the ground.įundamentally, lifting things higher and further away from the equipment’s centre of gravity puts more strain on the machine (think a pile of books in outstretched arms). What Type Of Forklift Trucks Are There?ĭemand for the forklift as we know it today, sprung from some key milestones: the introduction of electrically operated masts the need to efficiently shift armaments in WWII and, perhaps most crucially of all, the standardisation of pallet sizes.įind some old black and white photography of a forklift and there’s no overhead guard. Search-engine-savvy forklift truck dealers throughout the land are quick to point out on their ‘ history of the forklift truck’ pages, that the design is over 100 years old, has links to the railroads and something called the tructractor and blah, blah, blah.
Forks at the front, operator in the middle, counterweight at the back. Picture a forklift, search online for forklifts or ask your precocious child to draw a forklift and mostly what you will see is a counterbalance truck. To the average person in the street, if it has wheels, forks and lifts things, it’s a forklift truck, right? In that sense the sideloader is indeed, a forklift truck.
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