The telescopic handler or just telehandler is a heavy duty equipment which is popular within both the agriculture and construction businesses. These machines are rather similar in both appearance and function to the lift truck, except it more closely resembles a crane. The telehandler provides increased versatility of a single telescopic boom that can extend upwards as well as forwards from the vehicle. The operator can connect numerous attachments on the boom's end. Some of the most popular attachments comprise: a bucket, a muck grab, pallet forks or a lift table.
A telehandler usually utilizes pallet forks as their most popular attachment to be able to transport loads through areas that are usually unreachable for a standard forklift. Like for example, telehandlers are able to move cargo to and from places that are not normally accessible by standard forklift units. These devices also have the ability to remove palletized cargo from within a trailer and place these loads in high areas, such as on rooftops for instance. Before, this aforementioned situation will need a crane. Cranes can be very pricey to utilize and not always a time-efficient or practical choice.
Another advantage is also the telehandlers biggest limitation: since the boom extends or raises when the equipment is bearing a load, it also acts as a lever and causes the vehicle to become quite unbalanced, despite the counterweights on the rear. This translates to the lifting capacity decreasing fast as the working radius increases. The working radius is the distance between the front of the wheels and the center of the load.
When it is fully extended with a low boom angle for instance, the telehandler would just have a 400 pound weight capacity, while a retracted boom could support weights up to 5000 lb. The same model with a 5000 pound lift capacity which has the boom retracted may be able to easily support as heavy as 10,000 lb. with the boom raised up to 70.
The Matbro Company within Horley, Surrey, England originally pioneered telehandlers. These equipment were developed from their articulated cross country forestry forklifts. At first, they had a centrally mounted boom design on the front section. This placed the driver's cab on the machine's back part, as in the Teleram 40 model. The rigid chassis design with the cab located on the side and a rear mounted boom has ever since become more and more popular.