The telescopic handler or just telehandler is a heavy duty machinery which is popular within both the construction and agriculture industries. These machines are rather similar in both appearance and function to the lift truck, except it more closely resembles a crane. The telehandler offers increased versatility of a single telescopic boom that can extend forwards and upwards from the vehicle. The operator has the ability to attach numerous attachments on the boom's end. Several of the most popular attachments comprise: a bucket, a muck grab, a lift table or pallet forks.
A telehandler usually uses pallet forks as their most common attachment in order to move cargo through locations that are normally unreachable for a conventional forklift. For instance, telehandlers can move loads to and from places which are not typically reachable by standard forklift units. These devices can also remove palletized loads from inside a trailer and position these loads in high areas, such as on rooftops for instance. Previously, this situation mentioned above would require a crane. Cranes can be expensive to use and not always a time-efficient or practical alternative.
Telehandler's are unique in that their advantage is also their largest limitation: since the boom extends or raises when the machine is bearing a load, it also acts as a lever and causes the vehicle to become somewhat unbalanced, 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 front of the wheels and the center of the load.
Once it is completely 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 as much as 5000 lb. The same unit with a 5000 pound lift capacity which 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 cab of the driver on the machine's rear portion, like in the Teleram 40 model. The rigid chassis design with a rear mounted boom and the cab situated on the side has ever since become more famous.