wear and tear on a forklift

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Originally Posted by cook ..or maybe any vehicle. We have 6 warehouses and 2 forklifts. Boss is always complaining about using them too much,cost of propane and maintence, I can't blame him,thats his job as a boss and his money. It can carry 2500#. So in general,is harder/more cost to make 2 trips carring a 1,200# pallet vs. 1 trip with 2400#? I know there is no exact answer,just looking for some feedback/comments. Might apply to other thing,like a generator 1/2 load for 10 hours..or full load for 5 hours,etc... Curious on your thoughts.

That is a complicated question and hard to answer with explicit testing.

GENERALLY speaking though...starting cycles matter more than hours or miles on an engine. I used to work at a lumber mill and the boss was always going on about starting and stopping the mill. He claimed that it cost $40 in electricity to spin it up and so it was only worth it to turn it off if it was going to be off for at least an hour or more.

Longer hours at slower speed are better than shorter hours at high speed.

AGE means a lot when it comes to rubber parts such as seals and hoses but little to cylinders and bearings.

I don't remember where I read it...but somewhere on the net was an in-depth article on buying used heavy machines and it showed an example of two dump trucks with the same hours on them, but one that spent its time going back and forth on a 1/2 mile route with something like 50 feet of elevation change, vs another that spent its life on flat ground and the one that had to go up and down even that gentle slope was mostly worn out at the same hours where the flat route truck still had a lot of life.

Forklifts are tough little bastards though. I have beat them to hell, dropped them off things on their sides, set them on fire and froze them at -40 and they always seemed to keep running...unlike front end loaders, cranes, excavators etc that always seemed to be in the shop.

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wear and tear on a forklift