This truck on my right’s an electric counterbalance truck. It’s just come back from a hire and you can see, it needs a bit of a respray before it goes out again. So counterbalance trucks up to three and a half tonnes are rated at a load centre of 500mm. Now, what does that mean?

When your fork truck specialist comes onto the site to specify something, they need to know exactly the weight and the size of the loads sticking up with the truck. This truck is a 1.8 tonne capacity three-wheel electric counterbalance truck, and this truck will pick up 1 tonnes up to a certain lift height. As long as the load is only one metre deep and one metre high, and that the load is spread evenly within that area. If you’ve got all the weight at the very end of the load – or at the very back of the load – that will change the parameters of what the truck is able to do.

Load centres are really important on forklift trucks. If you suddenly change from picking up a one ton load – which is a metre deep – to a one ton load – two metres deep – it makes a massive difference, because a counterbalance truck has a weight on the back to stop the truck tipping forward. So the further you move the weight out, the more likely it is to tip forward, it’s as simple as that. We’ll move round and show you the capacity plate on the truck which is your best guide really to work out what you can and can’t lift with your forklift.

So all material handling equipment needs to have a specification plate attached to it. When your inspector comes around and does the annual inspection of your truck – or twice annual inspection of your truck depending on what it is – they will check that there is a specification plate on the truck, which tells you – err – what its capacity is and what its de-rated capacity is. If that isn’t on there then your truck will fail the thorough examination and they will require you to speak to your service provider and get a new plate fitted.

This capacity plate on the counterbalance truck gives me three different capacities. So I’ve got 1.8 tonnes at full lift height, at 500m load centre, so that’s a one metre deep load. At full lift height, if I go to a 1.2 metre deep load – so if I’m handling a Euro pallet or a UK 1,200 deep – that capacity drops down to 1,610 kilos. So you lose almost 200 kilos. If you then go to picking up a two metre deep load – with a 1,000mm load centre – then your capacity drops right down to 1,140 kilos. So you can see it has a dramatic affect in what we call “de-rating” the truck. So you mustn’t assume that some things only weighs a ton it’s not just the actual weight of the load. You mustn’t assume that the truck will pick it up if the load is bigger than one metre deep. You need to consult this and if its outside of the parameters of what’s on the specification plate of the truck, then you need to contact your service provider or the company who supplied you the truck and check with them before you try lifting anything.

Thank you for watching. If you have any questions, please refer to the operator’s manual for the machine or contact us at Locators.