A telehandler or a telescopic handler is a machinery which is popular within the agriculture and construction industries. These machines are similar in function and appearance to a forklift or a lift truck but are really more like a crane rather than a forklift. The telehandler offers improved versatility of a single telescopic boom that could extend forwards as well as upwards from the vehicle. The operator has the ability to connect various types of attachments on the boom's end. Several of the most popular attachments comprise: a bucket, a muck grab, a lift table or pallet forks.
To be able to move loads through locations that are usually unreachable for a conventional forklift. The telehandler utilizes pallet forks as their most common attachment. Like for instance, telehandlers are able to transport loads to and from areas that are not usually reachable by regular forklift units. These devices can also remove palletized cargo from in a trailer and place these loads in high areas, like on rooftops for instance. Before, this abovementioned situation would need a crane. Cranes can be expensive to utilize and not always a time-efficient or practical option.
Telehandler's are unique in that their advantage is also their biggest drawback: because the boom raises or extends when the machine is bearing a load, it also acts as a lever and causes the vehicle to become quite unstable, even with the rear counterweights. This translates to the lifting capacity decreasing fast as the working radius increases. The working radius is the distance between the front of the wheels and the center of the load.
When it is fully extended with a low boom angle for instance, the telehandler would only have a 400 pound weight capacity, while a retracted boom could support weights as much as 5000 pounds. The same unit with a 5000 pound lift capacity which has the boom retracted might be able to easily support as much as 10,000 pounds with the boom raised up to 70.
The Matbro Company in Horley, Surrey, England originally pioneered telehandlers. These equipment were developed from their articulated cross country forestry forklifts. Initially, they had a centrally mounted boom design on the front portion. This placed the driver's cab on the rear portion of the equipment, as in the Teleram 40 model. The rigid chassis design with a rear mounted boom and the cab situated on the side has since become increasingly more famous.