FEATURE | BELOW-THE-HOOK
Pallet lifters from Harringtons have fixed (left) or adjustable (right) forks.
loads are manually secured. The Morse 90 series have remote grip and release; its 92 series will lift plastic or fibre drums as well as steel; the 41 series of lifting hooks are for carrying the drum horizontally rather than vertically; and we have not yet begun to exhaust its range. Morse is based in Syracuse, New York, and also has a European office in the Netherlands.
PALLET LIFTERS Pallets are ubiquitous in material handling. They are, after all, the simplest, and the universal, way of moving heavy objects, collections of objects and stacks of objects – and the objects can be everything from bricks and concrete blocks to cardboard packages of plastic toys. Usually, of course, pallets are moved by forklift truck. But in many situations – such as manufacturing plants or packing plants – an overhead crane or hoist is to be preferred. Harrington Hoists, a Kito Crosby brand, has a range of pallet lifters that are attached below the hook. Largest is the 20-ton capacity HPLHD –
Fixed Fork Heavy Duty Pallet Lifter – which is counter-balanced so that it hangs level when unloaded. It is designed with a double frame to lift and carry heavy palletised loads efficiently with an overhead crane. The bail is a lower-headroom design, and is positioned to avoid side-loading the crane hook. Options with larger throat openings, and with greater outside fork widths, are available.
30 | April 2025 |
www.hoistmagazine.com The 2.5-ton HPLAF comes with adjustable
forks – the operator pushes them in or out to change their separation in order to handle various pallet sizes. The 1.5-ton HPLAH version has a hand wheel that does the same job. Both of these are counter- balanced. Its 3.0-ton capacity HPLLW - Lightweight Pallet Lifter instead comes with dual lift points as a method to allow the lifter to hang level when unloaded.
SCISSOR GRABS The devices above are designed for lifting loads with particular shapes. There are also shapeless loads – that is to say, loads that are irregular, each one different, with no plane or smooth surfaces on them, and
The Stonegate Sky Rider is for lifting slabs of stone.
there are below-the-hook devices designed specifically for such irregular lumps. Quarried stone, in the form of boulders, is the classic example – and the scissor grab is the classic lifting tool for them. Indeed, it has been so for some thousands of years: the Romans lifted their building blocks with scissor grabs – sometimes hand-held, sometimes attached to some kind of crane. Like the drum clamp, it is self-locking: it is the weight of the load itself that keeps the jaws clamped shut. It is a design has stood the test of time. Mini- crane specialists GGR also make scissor grabs. Its Boulder & Stone Scissor Grab can be hand-held, in which case it is operated as a two-man device, or it can be used as
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