Description: If you are a business manager in the process of having a new, large, open-air facility built that includes a loading dock area, there is of course a good deal of dock equipment that you’ll need to purchase so that your dock area will operate at maximum efficiency.

Description: If you are a business manager in the process of having a new, large, open-air facility built that includes a loading dock area, there is of course a good deal of dock equipment that you’ll need to purchase so that your dock area will operate at maximum efficiency. This equipment will include dock lights, barricades, bumpers, and door seals, along with items such as yard ramps and wheel chocks. In addition, loading dock levelers are vital pieces of equipment that no efficient dock area can be without. Please take a few moments to read the following brief article to gain an overview of loading dock levelers and their essential function so that you can begin to determine which type of leveler will best suit your facility’s requirements and help enable your loading dock area to operate with maximum efficiency.

Loading dock levelers are indispensable material handling equipment for businesses with loading docks. In fact, the more busy a loading dock area is, the more essential these dock levelers are to help ensure that the dock area operates as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The overriding reason a loading leveler is vital is because it’s an all-too-frequent occurrence of a truck backing up to a dock only for workers to immediately notice that the truck’s bed is significantly higher or lower than the dock platform. Dock levelers do exactly what their name suggests: they adjust for height differences between the dock and a truck. This aspect of the hydraulic ramps enables trucks to be loaded and unloaded much faster while at the same time placing much less physical strain on dock workers.

Another important feature of hydraulic dock levelers also serve as loading ramps between the dock platforms and the truck beds. This aspect is vital because there are many instances in which a truck’s end cannot be made flush with a dock, creating the need for some type of loading ramp. Functioning as dock ramps, they enable hand carts and fork trucks to be operated easily from dock platform to truck bed and vice-versa. Other essential and similar equipment for a new dock area include portable truck boards and portable ramps. Another item that’s also frequently necessary to loading dock efficiency is the dockplate. Aluminum dockplates, which function essentially as mini-ramps, are inexpensive and designed for comparatively lightweight loading and unloading jobs.

As railroads and railway boxcars still are in frequent use, there also is high-quality dock equipment available that’s designed specifically to facilitate the loading and unloading of boxcars. One such piece of equipment is the steel railroad dockboard. These rail dockboards, which are very similar in appearance to many loading dock levelers designed for use with trucks, serve essentially as short ramps to allow the swift and efficient movement of cargo-carrying carts from the boxcars to the dock platform and vice-versa. Steel railroad dockboards are custom-built to exact specifications provided by facility managers. They’re designed to accommodate all types of boxcars, including refrigerated cars as well as cars specifically designed for the lumber and paper industries. It is the customer’s responsibility to verify correctness of fit for applications.

Resources:
Beacon Technology is a world-class provider of Dock Levelers. Since 1949, the Beacon Brand has been serving dealers, architects, specifiers, designers, builders and buyers for commercial, industrial and government material handling equipment projects.
Beacon has Manual Dock Levelers that come in a wide array of configurations, and are perfect for any application.

Author: Kevin Harris

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