A telehandler or a telescopic handler is a machine that is popular within the agriculture and construction businesses. These machinery are similar in appearance and function to a lift truck or a forklift but are really more similar to a crane instead of a forklift. The telehandler offers improved versatility of a single telescopic boom that can extend forwards as well as upwards from the vehicle. The operator could connect lots of attachments on the boom's end. Several of the most popular attachments consist of: a bucket, a muck grab, pallet forks or a lift table.
In order to move cargo through locations which are usually unreachable for a typical forklift. The telehandler uses pallet forks as their most common attachment. Like for example, telehandlers could transport cargo to and from locations which are not usually accessible by conventional forklift models. These devices also have the ability to remove palletized loads from in a trailer and place these loads in high locations, like on rooftops for example. Previously, this situation mentioned above will need a crane. Cranes could be expensive to use and not always a time-efficient or practical option.
Telehandler's are unique in that their advantage is also their biggest drawback: as 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, despite the rear counterweights. This translates to the lifting capacity decreasing quickly as the working radius increases. The working radius is the distance between the center of the load and the front of the wheels.
Once it is fully extended with a low boom angle for instance, the telehandler will only have a 400 pound weight capacity, whilst a retracted boom could support weights up to 5000 lb. The same unit with a 5000 pound lift capacity which has the boom retracted might be able to easily support as heavy as 10,000 pounds with the boom raised up to 70.
The Matbro Company within Horley, Surrey, England originally pioneered telehandlers. These machines were developed from their articulated cross country forestry forklifts. At first, they had a centrally mounted boom design on the front section. This positioned the cab of the driver on the equipment's back portion, like in the Teleram 40 unit. The rigid chassis design with the cab located on the side and a rear mounted boom has since become more and more popular.