Larger fork flats to increase lift capacity
Tata Steel is developing a new family of larger fork arm flats, which will be available to the market by the end of 2014.
The company is responding to a customer preference for larger fork trucks with higher lift capacities and stronger, larger forks. This is being driven by demand for ever more productive forklifts.
These new products will increase the maximum size of fork flats the company is currently able to offer from 200mm to 250mm wide. Once the trials are completed later this year, the additional sizes, 250x100mm and 250x110mm, will complement the 26 existing sizes of strong, boron-treated steels already on offer for fork production.
Boron is used as an alloying element in the production of this type of carbon steel, and has similar attributes to chromium, nickel and molybdenum in terms of increasing the strength of the steel. Boron brings a number of cost benefits, benefits which are already being passed on to their customers. The larger fork flats will allow OEMs to create forks for vehicles with much higher load capacities, allowing more material to be moved in each operating cycle, resulting in greater efficiency. In this way the operator can save energy and time, increasing the vehicle’s performance over its lifetime.
Dave Watson, Tata Steel’s Product Marketing Manager for material handling, said: “To develop and design complex products like this, we work closely with major OEM customers through our Early Vendor Involvement (EVI) programme. By doing this we can better understand the challenges they face, and ensure that the solution matches their needs. For the development of the larger forks, we worked with a pilot customer to trial a number of larger fork arm flats, with a range of different width and thickness capabilities.
“The customer ran a series of tests on trial material to validate the product’s properties, both to benchmark it against suppliers, and to discover ultimately how it will perform in its final application. From these trials we will establish a revised capability matrix outlining all of the new sizes, which will then be tested in the field by further customers. The final products are on track to be commercially available by the end of this year.”
