Hey all. I've spent the last couple of days kicking around the future pallet racking setup for my outbuilding. The building is about 30'x50', cement floors, 12' ceiling. Now that I've got a clear picture of what that will be (ye' ol' standard 42" depth / 8' height orange and green racks...) I'm thinking about the stacking part.
I have a Kubota M7060 with forks that does a good enough job of moving pallets around outside, where there's room to move. 2000+lb fork capacity and it can go places most forklifts can't. And I've got a nice Crown manual pallet jack for moving pallets around on the ground inside my building, and out onto asphalt for the Kubota. So those parts of the pallet moving game are all set.
The Kubota is WAYYY too cumbersome to use inside the building or for delicate one-man pallet racking and stacking indoors, so that's where I'm looking at options for lifting pallets up onto the racks, and dropping pallets to the floor. Once I get them to the floor, my pallet jack can take over, and outside the building, the Kubota can handle the rest.
I won't be moving things often - we're talking once or twice a week at most, and there will likely be weeks where I don't move anything at all up or down off racks. I fully recognize the utility of a dedicated forklift, but a lot of the functionality is redundant to my Kubota. And, I don't want to take up the floor space and have yet another vehicle to maintain and troubleshoot.
Based on the above, I've been looking at semi-electric and manual walkie stackers. The electric units either have huge multi-hundred pound, expensive lead acid batteries, or lithium batteries for up and down motion. When they fail - and they all eventually fail - the unit is a brick. They're also full of hydrualic pumps, valves, and on newer units, circuit boards and electronics that are potential failure points and headaches. Parts are hard to come by, as is service info. The benefit is easy lifting - just hit a button and viola, your forks are 8' in the air.
Manual units are similarly rated, lower profile in the rear, are dead simple AND require minimal floorspace, but on the downside require the operator to hand pump or foot pump the forks up ~1" at a time. Seems tedious, but I've never used one. It's the exact same pumping action as for a pallet floor jack. I can order one of these brand new for about $2000 and even in the case that it sits for months, never worry about a dead battery or similar.
Am I insane to think about a manual unit for this type of service? We're talking like, 100 pumps to get a pallet up in the air. Will I hate the thing in a month? Would love some feedback from folks who have used both.
I have a Kubota M7060 with forks that does a good enough job of moving pallets around outside, where there's room to move. 2000+lb fork capacity and it can go places most forklifts can't. And I've got a nice Crown manual pallet jack for moving pallets around on the ground inside my building, and out onto asphalt for the Kubota. So those parts of the pallet moving game are all set.
The Kubota is WAYYY too cumbersome to use inside the building or for delicate one-man pallet racking and stacking indoors, so that's where I'm looking at options for lifting pallets up onto the racks, and dropping pallets to the floor. Once I get them to the floor, my pallet jack can take over, and outside the building, the Kubota can handle the rest.
I won't be moving things often - we're talking once or twice a week at most, and there will likely be weeks where I don't move anything at all up or down off racks. I fully recognize the utility of a dedicated forklift, but a lot of the functionality is redundant to my Kubota. And, I don't want to take up the floor space and have yet another vehicle to maintain and troubleshoot.
Based on the above, I've been looking at semi-electric and manual walkie stackers. The electric units either have huge multi-hundred pound, expensive lead acid batteries, or lithium batteries for up and down motion. When they fail - and they all eventually fail - the unit is a brick. They're also full of hydrualic pumps, valves, and on newer units, circuit boards and electronics that are potential failure points and headaches. Parts are hard to come by, as is service info. The benefit is easy lifting - just hit a button and viola, your forks are 8' in the air.
Manual units are similarly rated, lower profile in the rear, are dead simple AND require minimal floorspace, but on the downside require the operator to hand pump or foot pump the forks up ~1" at a time. Seems tedious, but I've never used one. It's the exact same pumping action as for a pallet floor jack. I can order one of these brand new for about $2000 and even in the case that it sits for months, never worry about a dead battery or similar.
Am I insane to think about a manual unit for this type of service? We're talking like, 100 pumps to get a pallet up in the air. Will I hate the thing in a month? Would love some feedback from folks who have used both.
