Scissor Dock Lifts Questions and Answers

What are Scissor Dock Lifts?

Scissor Dock Lifts are a platform that is specifically designed for truck and semi trailer loading and unloading. This material handling equipment enables a single worker to load very heavy items onto a truck. Often, these heavy materials would be impossible, or, at the very least, time consuming for several employees working together to load. The equipment Beacon offers has a lift range of 4,000 to 30,000 lbs. These materials are often organized on pallets, which are moved onto lowered scissor dock lifts by a single worker with a pallet truck. With a single push of an electric button, one hydraulic scissor dock lift can raise the pallet load into position where the worker can use the pallet truck to roll the load onto the truck or trailer bed.

What are the uses of Scissor Dock Lifts?

In addition to enabling the loading and unloading of heavy cargo from trucks and semi trailers, Scissor Dock Lifts are often used to raise small groups of workers. Models have hand and safety rails for workers to hold onto as well as to prevent loads from sliding off the lift. Along with raising and lowering pallet trucks, the unit is also excellent for transferring other wheeled, load-carrying equipment from lowered height to truck-bed level and vice-versa. This other material-carrying equipment includes fork trucks, portable product lifts and various types of carts.

How are Scissor Dock Lifts safer?

The Scissor Dock Lift can provide an additional very important benefit – significant worker injury reduction while enabling truck loading and unloading to take place with optimum efficiency, allowing more effective use of man-hours. Some companies do in fact ask employees to work in tandem to load very heavy materials onto trucks. This can result in serious musculoskeletal injuries, from low-back disc problems to neck and shoulder problems. These injuries can occur suddenly, or over time, such as the development of cumulative trauma disorders. These types of injuries can result in increased company health care costs along with a rise in absenteeism and worker’s compensation claims. Investing in this type of equipment will enable a company to significantly reduce the incidence of these types of injuries that can be caused by heavy manual lifting.

How do Scissor Docks save time and money?

There are many businesses that do not have loading docks and yet nonetheless send and receive frequent, sizable shipments via truck. Manually loading and unloading the large cargo by having employees spend considerable amounts of time passing boxes down to each other is a poor use of company man-hours. Additionally, many trucking companies will charge for excessive time that a truck spends parked at a facility while workers unload it. If this occurs with any degree of frequency, it can be profit draining and one that companies need not occur if they invest in a few important pieces of truck loading and unloading equipment. One vital piece of such equipment, especially for businesses that ship or receive heavy materials with a low or high loading dock is the scissor dock lift.