Material Handling Equipment

Material Handling Equipment Buying Guide

Start with the unit load, not the machine. Everything in this category answers one question: what shape is the thing you move all day? Palletized loads point you at pallet trucks and stackers. Drums point you at the Morse line, the deepest bench in the collection at more than 50 products. Boxes, cylinders, and odd one-off loads ride on Valley Craft hand trucks, platform carts, and dollies, with specialty builds like A-frame carts for panels and sheet stock. And if the real problem is holding work at the right height rather than moving it, that is a lift table or tilt table, like Vestil's Efficiency Master tilt tables that angle a bin toward the operator. A few jobs have their own shelves: machinery too heavy for wheels slides on machine moving skates, with BVA hydraulic toe jacks and cylinders to get it off the floor; loads that run the same short path every day belong on roller conveyors and ball transfers; stock overhead is a rolling warehouse ladder problem; and powered positioning built into your own fixtures comes from Duff Norton linear actuators. Naming the unit load first cuts 197 products down to a dozen candidates.

Manual or powered. Manual wins on price, upkeep, and training overhead; powered wins on distance, frequency, and grades. A Vestil hand pallet truck handles occasional moves on smooth concrete for a few hundred dollars. Step up to an electric pallet truck when moves run all shift, routes get long, loads sit near the truck's rating, or there is a ramp anywhere in the path. Step up again to a powered stacker, with power drive, power lift, and powered fork reach on the top models, when pallets also have to go up onto racking. Vestil covers the whole ladder here, including electric trucks from its Pegasolift and Pramac lines and a single-fork model for odd pallets. Above walk-behind gear the ladder tops out at full forklift trucks, EKKO electric stackers, reach trucks, and riders, and if a lift truck is already on the floor, the forklift attachments collection, hooks, jibs, hoppers, and drum rotators, lets it do more of this list. Be honest about the duty cycle: an underbought manual truck gets replaced within a year, and it takes an operator's back with it.

Powered equipment brings OSHA training with it. An electric pallet truck or walkie stacker is a powered industrial truck under OSHA 29 CFR 1910.178, the same rule that covers forklifts. 1910.178(l) requires every operator to be trained and evaluated before running one, with a re-evaluation at least every three years, and the requirement applies to walk-behind equipment just as it does to sit-down trucks. Manual equipment carries no certification requirement. Powered is still often the right buy; just budget the training alongside the truck and keep the records, because operator certification is one of the first things an OSHA inspection asks to see.

Drum handling is its own discipline. A 55 gallon drum of water weighs about 460 lb full, and denser process liquids push past 600, which is why drums get purpose-built machines instead of a hand truck and hope. Morse splits the job by task. For moving, 2-wheel drum trucks, including self-standing models, walk a drum across the floor. For dispensing, mobile Karriers lift the drum and tilt it to pour at a workstation, with scale-equipped versions for batching by weight. For overhead work, below-hook Kontrol-Karriers hang from your hoist or crane and tilt the drum by pull chain or power tilt, turning the hoist into a controlled high-level pourer. For mixing, drum rollers and tumblers turn the whole container. Match the machine to the drum material as well: plastic and fiber drums will not take equipment built to grip a steel chime, so Morse builds dedicated Karriers for them.

Capacity, floors, and environment. Rated capacity should clear your heaviest real load with margin, the same rule as everything else we sell, but floors and environment decide more purchases in this category than capacity does. Standard pallet truck wheels want smooth interior concrete; run one across gravel or broken asphalt and it stalls. For yards and job sites, Vestil builds all-terrain pallet trucks and a rough terrain stacker with running gear sized for it. Check aisle width and turning room against your racking before buying any stacker, measure door heights for tall-mast equipment, and if the gear will live outdoors or under washdown, pick finishes rated for it. The cheapest capacity upgrade in this category is usually a better-matched wheel.