The telescopic handler or just telehandler is a heavy duty equipment that is well-known within both the construction and agriculture businesses. These equipment are rather similar in both appearance and function to the forklift, except it more closely resembles a crane. The telehandler provides improved versatility of a single telescopic boom which can extend upwards as well as forwards from the vehicle. The operator could attach numerous attachments on the boom's end. Some of the most popular attachments include: a bucket, a muck grab, a lift table or pallet forks.
A telehandler usually uses pallet forks as their most common attachment to be able to move loads through areas which are usually unreachable for a standard forklift. Like for instance, telehandlers could move loads to and from places which are not usually reachable by standard forklift models. These devices also have the ability to remove palletized loads from inside a trailer and position these loads in high locations, like on rooftops for instance. Before, this situation mentioned above would need a crane. Cranes could be pricey to utilize and not always a practical or time-efficient choice.
Telehandler's are unique in that their advantage is also their biggest limitation: since the boom extends or raises when the machinery is bearing a load, it also acts as a lever and causes the vehicle to become quite 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 front of the wheels and the center of the load.
Once it is fully extended with a low boom angle for example, the telehandler would 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 may be able to easily support as heavy as 10,000 lb. with the boom raised up to 70.
England initially pioneered the telehandler in Horley, Surrey. The Matbro Company developed these machinery from their articulated cross country forestry forklifts. At first, they had a centrally mounted boom design on the front portion. This placed the cab of the driver on the equipment's back portion, as in the Teleram 40 unit. The rigid chassis design with a rear mounted boom and the cab located on the side has since become more and more popular.