Forklifts are everywhere. Warehouses. Factories. Steel mills. Lumber yards. Construction sites. Marinas. Ports. Distribution centers. Because they’re so common, most people don’t give them much thought. A forklift picks something up, moves it somewhere else and puts it down. Simple enough.
Except forklifts are actually pretty interesting machines. Some of the things we consider completely normal about forklifts today are the result of more than a century of engineering. Others seem strange until you understand why they’re designed that way.
So instead of talking about maintenance schedules, repair costs or what to look for when buying a used forklift, I thought we’d have a little fun.
Here are 10 Forklift Facts you probably didn’t know.
Electric forklifts can seem like part of today’s push toward electrification. They’re not. Battery-powered industrial trucks existed in the early 1900s, and companies such as Elwell-Parker and Yale were important pioneers in their development.
Yale traces its first electric forklift truck to 1920. By the early 1920s, manufacturers were combining electric propulsion, forks and elevated masts into machines that increasingly resembled today’s forklift. So when someone talks about electric forklifts as the future, there’s a little irony involved. Electric was there almost from the beginning.
What’s new isn’t the basic concept. It’s the technology surrounding it that’s new; modern AC motors, sophisticated controls, lithium-ion batteries, fast charging and battery-management systems.
When you drive a car, you steer with your front wheels. However, most counterbalanced forklifts steer with their rear wheels.
Why? Maneuverability.
A forklift spends much of its life working in confined spaces. It needs to approach a pallet, make tight turns, line up with racking and maneuver through aisles that leave very little room for error. Rear wheel steering allows the front of the forklift and therefore the forks and load to pivot much more tightly around the drive axle.
But there’s a catch. When the operator turns, the rear of the forklift swings outward. Anyone who has spent time around forklifts has seen why that’s important. That big counterweight behind the operator isn’t following the same path as the front wheels. It’s swinging and anything standing in its path is going to have a bad day.
This surprises a lot of people. A forklift rated to lift 5,000 pounds doesn’t weigh 5,000 pounds. It may weigh considerably more.
Why? Because the machine has to counterbalance the load sitting in front of the front axle.
That’s why the back of a conventional forklift contains such a large counterweight. The heavier the load, and the farther its center of gravity moves forward, the greater the overturning force the forklift must resist. Scale that concept up to high-capacity forklifts and things get extreme very quickly. Some giant forklifts weigh well over 100,000 pounds themselves. In specialized applications, the machine can weigh considerably more than the object it’s lifting.
Here’s one that gets people into trouble.
When a forklift says 5,000 LB Capacity, many people think it can lift anything weighing 5,000 pounds, right?
Not necessarily. Forklift capacity is based on specific conditions, including a specified load center. Move the load’s center of gravity farther away from the mast and the forklift’s effective capacity decreases.
Add a heavy attachment? That can change capacity too. Raise the load high into the air? Depending on the forklift and configuration, capacity may change again. That’s why a capacity data plate contains much more information than one big number. A forklift isn’t simply rated for a weight. It’s rated for a weight under specific conditions.
We’ve all seen it when the load doesn’t quite fit. The operator gets the forks underneath it a little bit and decides, “That’s probably enough.” Except forklifts don’t work that way. Loads should generally be positioned as far back toward the fork heel and load backrest as the application allows.
Why?
Because pushing the load farther toward the fork tips moves its center of gravity farther away from the forklift. Remember what we just discussed about load center? Same problem. A 4,000-pound load positioned correctly and the same 4,000-pound load hanging way out on the fork tips do not create the same effect on the forklift. A few inches can matter much more than people realize.
If you’ve ever driven a forklift across a rough surface, you probably figured this one out pretty quickly. Forklifts aren’t designed to ride like cars. Stability is more important than comfort. Many conventional forklifts use a rigid front drive axle while the rear steer axle pivots to allow the machine to travel over uneven surfaces.
That arrangement is part of the forklift’s stability system. also explains why hitting a pothole on a forklift can feel considerably different from hitting one in your pickup truck, and it explains why tire condition and operating surface matter so much. The forklift, tires, load and floor are all interacting with each other.
This is an important misconception. People sometimes think “The forklift is rated for 5,000 pounds, and I’m only carrying 4,000. I’m safe.” Not necessarily. Forklift stability isn’t determined by load weight alone.
A machine can become unstable because of:
That’s because a forklift and its load create a combined center of gravity. As the forklift accelerates, brakes, turns, raises a load or travels over uneven ground, that center of gravity moves. The machine may be comfortably below its rated capacity and still become unstable.
A 10,000-pound forklift looks big if you’re accustomed to warehouse equipment. A 30,000-pound forklift looks enormous. Then you enter the world of heavy industry. There are counterbalanced forklifts with rated capacities exceeding 100,000 pounds. These machines work in applications involving steel, industrial machinery, large dies, precast concrete, lumber, heavy manufacturing and other loads that simply can’t be broken down into smaller pieces.
Then there are specialized machines such as container handlers and marina forklifts that solve completely different heavy-lifting problems. A marina forklift may need to lift a large boat with its center of gravity many feet in front of the mast. A container handler may need to pick up a loaded shipping container. At that scale, calling everything a “forklift” almost seems too simple. But the fundamental engineering principle remains surprisingly similar.
People unfamiliar with industrial equipment sometimes assume every tire contains air. Not forklift tires. Many forklifts use cushion tires, which are solid rubber tires pressed onto a steel wheel. Others use solid pneumatic-style tires that look more like conventional outdoor tires but are also solid.
Why use solid tires? Because industrial environments aren’t particularly friendly to tires. Metal debris, nails, sharp objects, heavy loads, repeated turning, constant stopping and starting. A flat tire on a heavily loaded forklift isn’t something anyone wants to deal with in the middle of a production shift.
Different tire designs also dramatically change where a forklift can effectively operate. A compact cushion-tire forklift may be excellent on smooth concrete inside a manufacturing plant. Take the same machine into a muddy lumber yard and you’ll quickly discover why large pneumatic tire forklifts exist.
This may be the biggest one. The forklift didn’t simply make warehouses faster. It helped change how warehouses were designed.
Before powered lifting equipment became widespread, vertical storage was limited by how material could realistically be placed and retrieved. Once forklifts could reliably raise palletized loads, businesses realized they didn’t have to keep expanding warehouses outward.
Modern warehouses with products stored 20, 30 or 40 feet in the air exist partly because material-handling equipment made that space usable. The forklift didn’t simply adapt to the warehouse. The warehouse adapted to the forklift.
These machines have changed tremendously over the past century, but the basic problem they’re solving hasn’t. Next time you walk past a forklift sitting in the corner of a warehouse, take another look. There’s a lot more engineering sitting there than you might think.
At Forklift Exchange, we work with everything from everyday warehouse forklifts to specialized high-capacity equipment. If you’re trying to determine what type, capacity or configuration makes sense for your application, we’re always happy to talk through it.
Jason Flaska
Forklift Exchange
📞 630-842-0779
📧 jasonf@forkliftexchange.com
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