RM Online - What you need to know about aerial lift equipment

If you've spent much time on the job site lately, there's a good chance that you've seen a lot more aerial lift equipment out there than you did a few years ago. If it's not from your store, you're missing opportunities.

"We're based in a small town, but even our general rental store has five aerial work platforms," says Mark Mohn, product manager for Grove Manlift, a division of Grove Worldwide, in Shady Grove, Pa. "If you let your customers know you have them, people will rent them."

People have finally recognized all the benefits aerial lift equipment can provide. "It's all about productivity and safety," Mohn says.

In general, people are looking for more simplified machines, even though the technological efforts today are aimed at using microprocessors more and more to control machine systems.

People are looking for higher performance at lower prices. "As a result, we have developed design techniques that allow engineers to conduct finite element analysis to see where the hot spots are," Mohn says. "It used to be that manufacturers overdesigned aerial lift equipment to be on the safe side, but that's no longer necessary."

Another phenomenon that is just beginning to appear is the use of aerial work platforms on residential construction projects, according to Don Roach, vice president marketing for Snorkel International, St. Joseph, Mo. "We were on our way to a meeting in South Carolina and we saw a roofing contractor along the way using an articulated boom, so I stopped to talk to them," says Roach. "Contractors are starting to move away from climbing ladders and scaffolds for certain applications."

The rental market for boom equipment has been moving toward articulated booms, which many believe have a higher return on investment. Articulated booms are very versatile machines, also. More than 100 trades use this equipment.

When it comes to application variety and convenience, it's hard to beat the versatile scissor lift. For Grove, the bread-and-butter rental product has been the small electric 20- and 25-foot scissor lifts. Rental businesses can get a great deal of utilization because many different types of rental customers use them, Mohn says. These units can drive through a standard door or standard double-door.

Roach is seeing the same kind of interest at Snorkel. People want the capability of the 20-foot scissor lift in the compact size of a 15-foot machine, so that has become a big market. In addition, Snorkel is getting many requests to design a 30-foot machine, Roach says.

"Most industrial plant sites are very congested," he says. "Many times eight-foot-wide aisles are reduced to six feet. Well, that's fine for a forklift, but they also need a scissor lift that can move in that aisle as well."

Construction jobs are another example. A few years ago, one or two trades might be working on a job at the same time. Today there are typically 12 to 15 trades out there, so narrow machines are needed to maneuver around the job site.

Safety issues also dominate the discussion of aerial lift equipment.

"We are required by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) to adhere to ANSI 8.92 and related regulations," Mohn says. "They are very direct about what owners are supposed to do, so if you are renting aerial work platforms, you have to train every operator you rent the machine to. If you don't do that, you're asking for trouble."

Roach says Snorkel has responded to this need by developing a comprehensive aerial work platform training program that can be used no matter what manufacturer's products you have in your inventory.

"We developed an interactive computer-based training program on CD-ROM," he says. "This is important because not only does ANSI say you will train all operators, you must also keep a record of who you train."

The program is constructed as a series of training steps with questions after each session. If you don't pass the questions after each session, you have to take that portion of the training over again. The program was designed for scissor lifts, articulated booms and straight lifts.

After each renter is trained, he or she must log on with name and Social Security number. The next time that person rents a lift of a certain kind, the computer will indicate whether he or she has been trained on it. That information can then be downloaded onto a disk. It really can help with liability issues, should a trained person get hurt.

"We do stress, however, that this is not pure operator training," says Roach. "The rental store should still be conducting hands-on training with customers."