The telescopic handler or just telehandler is a heavy duty machinery that is well-known within both the construction and agriculture businesses. These machines are rather similar in both appearance and function to the lift truck, except it more closely resembles a crane. The telehandler offers improved versatility of a single telescopic boom that can extend forwards as well as upwards from the vehicle. The operator could connect numerous attachments on the boom's end. Several of the most popular attachments comprise: a muck grab, a bucket, pallet forks or a lift table.
A telehandler normally utilizes pallet forks as their most common attachment in order to move cargo through locations that are usually not reachable for a typical forklift. Like for example, telehandlers are able to transport loads to and from places that are not typically reachable by conventional forklift models. These devices also have the ability to remove palletized loads from within a trailer and place these loads in high locations, like on rooftops for instance. Previously, this situation mentioned above would require a crane. Cranes can be really pricey to use and not always a time-efficient or practical choice.
One more advantage is also the telehandlers biggest drawback: because the boom raises or extends when the machinery is bearing a load, it also acts as a lever and causes the vehicle to become somewhat unstable, despite the counterweights on the back. This translates to the lifting capacity decreasing quickly as the working radius increases. The working radius is the distance between the center of the load and the front of the wheels.
Once it is completely extended with a low boom angle for example, the telehandler will just have a 400 pound weight capacity, whilst a retracted boom can support weights up to 5000 lb. The same model with a 5000 pound lift capacity that has the boom retracted may be able to easily support as much as 10,000 lb. with the boom raised up to 70.
The Matbro Company in Horley, Surrey, England first 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 portion. This positioned the driver's cab on the back portion of the machinery, as in the Teleram 40 unit. The rigid chassis design with the cab situated on the side and a rear mounted boom has since become more famous.