There is plenty of morons driving them i used to repair them for a nissan dealer they used them as a gauntlet and pierced the fuel tanks, drive them off loading bays, turn them over, drive like a rally driver over jumps, but nobody seems bothered.
It was v good revenue plenty of repair work and some had blood stains too!
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When I worked for a large industrial company, it never ceased to amaze me how fork lift drivers could manage to cause so much damage.
One driver managed to destroy a large electrical panel, plunging half the site into darkness. The thing was, the panel was totally surrounded by a huge metal barrier - painted in a luminescent red. Simple mathematics proved that the fork lift would have had to have been tilted > 40 degrees (i.e. toppling on two wheels) whilst heading in collision course with a brick wall to have actually made contact with panel. We called that the "pirouette" incident.
In another incident, a colleague went to collect a box containing a £100k industrial computer. On arrival he noticed the two neat rectangular holes puncturing the box and running right through the 100,000 pound computer and out the other side!
Apparently the driver "often missed the crate when he was in a hurry". Or drunk.
Fork lift drivers often drove off loading bays, but the best "aftermath" I saw was when loading onto the back of a Turkish lorry. The lorry was so old and corroded, that the weight of the fork lift and the cargo caused the entire floor to give way and the fork lift fell crashing through to the ground below!
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they used them as a gauntlet too!
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What does that mean?
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Yes,I was wondering how you use a forklift as a type of glove.
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>> they used them as a gauntlet too! What does that mean?
I took it to mean a Knights of the Realm type thing, blasting towards your opponent on a fine white ......fork lift
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Ladies hanky tied to yer overalls I guess...
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In a carpet warehouse there is a carpet boom fitted onto the carrage and the people that drive them drive full pelt at each other to see which one flinches first.
Then the boom ends up in the side of the fuel/hydraulic tank or through a wall!
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 07/11/2009 at 21:11
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Mate used to work in a large paint factory. They used huge numbers of ball bearings in the machines that mixed the paint, one day as he was reversing the forklift he just clipped a large container full of ball bearings - cue thousands upon thousands of ball bearings streaming out all over the warehouse...
As a young lad before the elf n safety stuff kicked in we were allowed to drive the forklift at the diy store where I had a saturday job. Sixteen year old lads and a forklift is a dangerous combination...
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Having driven FLT's of many shapes and sizes over the years, one of the things that never ceases to amaze me is that pedestrians don't appreciate just how dangerous they are. When you're unloading a lorry, your eyes have to be everywhere, watching the load as well as the space behind you, and you still get idiots walking behind you or under the load!
FLT's have blind spots, in fact even worse than lorries. They also tend to have solid (and usually worn to a slick) tyres as well, which don't make for easy stopping especially on a wet surface; and they're notoriously unstable. Even the small ones weigh nearly two tons; for those of you who aren't aware,most of the lump at the back is a solid metal casting which forms the counterbalance weight.
One example of H&S which was long overdue, making testing compulsory on such machines.
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Oh dear HM you've just triggered a best forgotten memory.
Back a good few (lifetime) years the company i worked for had a diesel engined fork truck (Bonzer or Hyster) that was road licenced and had unusually 3 or 4 forward gears and high/low ratio, i think it was manual too.
Now i had to go about a mile down the road to help out a local firm whose truck had broken down, so off i trundle down the road, and soon remembered it had high range so i selected the same and low and behold the thing would do about 30mph.
Now i'm sure some of you have already got there....the play in the truck's steering was appalling, probably a quarter turn of play at the wheel, and i'm driving a rear steer truck at about 30 mph...how it didn't turn over in the ensuing sway that developed i shall never know:-)
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My biking mate is a chartered loss adjuster. He went to a warehouse in Warrington where the same thing had happened, a forklift had brought down the entire contents of the building, boxes of Vodka, Scotch, and many other types of booze.
He spent a couple of hours wading round in an interesting, alchoholic cocktail of everything spilt.
He reckoned it was the only time he wished he'd been pulled over by the law on the way home !
' Have you been drinking, sir ? '
' Not a drop, occifer '
' Breathe into this please '
Ted
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that could be the same warehouse we at tesco used to get supplied from, was the accident about 20 years ago?...i recall stories going around at the time that the fire brigade who attended had to wear breathing apparatus because of the risk from alcohol fumes...and also that they never found the forklift trucks involved
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that could be the same warehouse
Very possibly ZK....My pal was certainly in the trade 20 yrs ago.
Sounds like too much of a co-incidence not to be. He's got some good tales to tell, was involved with the Riverdance...I wouldn't have minded going with him to see that from close up.
Ted
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Best example of stupid I ever witnessed on a FLT was at Hilton depot in Derbyshire, then a storage and distribution facility for Bass brewers.
Hilton was an old Army depot, and the sheds had hanger-type doors with guide rails at the bottom. Our FLT's were of the "double-handler" type, which pick up two 1-ton pallets side by side. This particlular type of attachment doesn't tilt back very far so care has to be taken when driving.
One lad, trying to make time up, came out of the shed forwards at full speed with two pallets of Carling bottles on....... big no-no this of course!
Didn't have the mast up high enough, bottom of pallets hit top of guide rail, truck and pallets stopped dead and 3840 bottles of Carling Black Label kept going.
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I have 2 memories of driving FLTs whilst working at Safeway. Of course, I had not passed anything resembling a test.
My direct involvement was on a Sat night, 9.30pm, a cold freezing winter's night and we had outside containers with a steel freestanding ramp going up to the door. Drove forklift out the container onto the ramp and applied brakes (prob a bit too hard on hind sight). This caused the ramp to slide backwards and left the rear wheels on the ramp and the front wheels hanging off the end of it. Yes it was FWD of course. Cue lots of scratching chins and heads trying to work out how to move this monster! Believe it or not we managed to lever the front of it up and back onto the ramp using a spare beam from our warehouse racking (note the association with the original story!!
Second, indirect involvement. Arriving as duty manager at 6.30 am I discovered that the baker, whilst walking to work at 4am, had came across our forklift on a path next to the railway station. Adjacent to approximately 20 yards of kerbing and pavement that had been ripped up! Nightshift supervisor was told and he went and brought the FLT back and nothing more was said although we had an idea of who the toerags were that had stolen it, we decided to keep silent and play dumb re the pavement!
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Only had one direct involvement with an FLT.
My local tile warehouse, where my lad had a Saturday job, bought one and asked me to collect it with the transporter from a farm near Ringway.
I preferred to winch it on to the truck rther than risk a first attempt at driving one.
It was the heaviest, solid block of metal I've ever had to move. It was only a small one and it was like having a solid 5ft cube of lead on board. I'm sure my back wheel rims were not far off the tarmac !
It later developed a fault and he rang me to take it back...I politely declined !
Ted
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>> they used them as a gauntlet too!
>>What does that mean?
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>>I took it to mean a Knights of the Realm type thing, blasting towards your opponent on a fine white ......fork lift
Jousting?
I would agree with bigtee about the number of morons that drive them. There's a massive parcel warehouse in Washwood Heath where the forklifts zoom around like the White Helmets.
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