Everyone Needs Pallet Forks
If you are in construction you will be taking delivery of items. A good portion of those items will be palletized. Some jobs will have access to a forklift to take care of this. Others will have problems like no traffic control so a forklift isn’t an option. An argument to make is that you can fly a pallet from a truck to the ground with straps in it. I can hear the argument in that if it isn’t going overhead, and it isn’t heavy enough to shock load the crane should it collapse, then maybe there isn’t much to get worked up over. Just don’t get near it in case it fails and scatters the heavy items.
The underlying problem is that this builds confidence in pallets where zero confidence should exist. 12 years or so ago I had a client call saying they lost a pallet in flight. It was loaded with slab grabs, if you are familiar with them. The impact was that that rigger was in the hospital and likely to never work again. But he was alive. They wanted rigging solutions. So I sold them baskets, pallet cages, and self-leveling pallet forks. This way they could see what worked for them.
The pallet forks were the winning solution. At this point, some of the suppliers were supplying solid forks where you would move the attachment location. And you can still get those. With the tower cranes of the day, it was difficult to hit the right location perfectly, so it was sometimes difficult to get people to use them. But the technology has improved and today’s cranes and forks work nicely. The Eichinger forks take into account the challenge of charging the forks in the pallet pockets. They are tapered in two planes to make it easier. Handles are added. The initial spring rate is light enough that you can adjust the elevation with a foot. This also allows for easier leveling of the forks. It used to be that you had to help the spring loaded trolley along to a level position. Today you just hoist up and it finds it’s level home. It is important to note that this is based on capacity. you do need about 30% of the fork capacity to pull it to level instead of being a bit tip heavy. Those 6600 lb forks look like the universal solution until you put a 500 lb load on them that the pallet looks like it wants to slide off. In those cases, a pallet bin and a set of forks is probably necessary to complete the job.
If you do have a tall load like brick, or pallets of paint, it’s a good idea to secure them in a bin. There are a few ways to skin the cat. What I think makes the most sense is flying the pallet with the forks, into the bin. Leave the forks charged, then hook up to the bin lifting eyes and fly it all. When you get to the landing you can pull the pallet out with the crane, then put the forks back in the bin and send it all back to the ground level for safe keeping.
I’ve seen some stuff with regard to palletized items. We should be engineering out the hazards. If we aren’t, then we are simply waiting for the problem to repeat. Give your people the tools to do the job right, and then require that they do it right. No shortcuts are worth the risk of seeing a pallet rapidly unload. We’re happy to help.
