The telescopic handler or just telehandler is a heavy duty equipment which is well-known 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 offers improved versatility of a single telescopic boom that can extend forwards and upwards from the vehicle. The operator can connect lots of attachments on the end of the boom. Several of the most popular attachments consist of: a muck grab, a bucket, a lift table or pallet forks.
A telehandler normally uses pallet forks as their most popular attachment to be able to move cargo through locations that are usually unreachable for a typical forklift. For instance, telehandlers could move loads to and from areas which are not typically accessible by conventional forklift units. These devices can also remove palletized cargo from inside a trailer and place these loads in high locations, like on rooftops for instance. Before, this abovementioned situation will need a crane. Cranes could be really expensive to use and not always a practical or time-efficient choice.
Telehandler's are unique in that their advantage is also their largest drawback: since the boom raises or extends when the machine is bearing a load, it also acts as a lever and causes the vehicle to become somewhat unstable, despite the counterweights on the rear. 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 fully 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 unit with a 5000 lb. lift capacity that has the boom retracted might be able to easily support as heavy as 10,000 lb. with the boom raised up to 70.
England originally pioneered the telehandler within Horley, Surrey. The Matbro Company developed these equipment from their articulated cross country forestry forklifts. At first, they had a centrally mounted boom design on the front portion. This positioned the cab of the driver on the rear part of the machine, like in the Teleram 40 unit. The rigid chassis design with a rear mounted boom and the cab situated on the side has ever since become more famous.