When every day is moving day

Even forklifts have gone electric.

Wolter Inc. is a materials handling specialist in the Midwest (wolterinc.com) that provides moving machinery to sawmills and large lumberyards, among other facilities. The company recently replaced an entire fleet of diesel and propane forklifts for PC Lumber in Indiana with electric lifts. In addition to lumber, PC distributes windows, doors and other architectural elements. The yard crew has discovered that their new Linde electric forklifts are quieter, smoother, respond faster, operate both indoors and out with no fumes, and the charging costs a small fraction of their former fuel costs (around 10 percent).

Not every woodshop needs a fleet of forklifts, but most need to move pallets of sheet goods or bunks of lumber on a regular basis. Several manufacturers build smaller electric forklifts that are ideal for a woodshop, especially in winter when the building is sealed and fossil fuel exhaust emissions are a challenge. Carer (carerforklifts.com) has been building them for almost 40 years and the British Columbia manufacturer specializes in lumber applications. Other suppliers include Bobcat, Toyota, Parker Hannifin, Hyster-Yale, Clark, Crown Equipment, Mitsubishi, Linde, and Caterpillar, to name a few.

Once a forklift or manual cart has delivered sheets or boards to a machine, material handling switches from gross to fine maneuvers. There are a lot of options when it comes to loading, unloading, stacking and tracking. Following is a tour of various options that is designed to help shop managers find options rather than simple solutions. Material handling is evolving rapidly, and factors such as artificial intelligence (AI) are affecting the way that software can be used to track, store, retrieve, move and place materials at machines.

The Mahros material handling line from SCM Group North America (scmgroup.com) includes the Stacker that can unload parts from a saw and read dimensions so it can orient parts; the Speedy that feeds and stack with single or double stations; the Brush feeder and stacker that can cycle up to 20 times a minute in drilling, banding and coating situations; the fully automated Runner that feeds and stacks without an operator present; the Carrier that moves large panels with suction cups to load and unload machines; a Panel Rotation System that can, for example, rotate a door 90 degrees; a selection of flippers that can rotate parts crosswise and/or lengthwise 180 degrees; and a family of conveyors and air cushion tables that can be formatted for pretty much any dimension on any machine.

Conveying is a concept that uses roller tables to move large, awkward, numerous or heavy loads horizontally, eliminating the need to lift, orient or otherwise handle parts manually. Atlantic Machinery in New Milford, Conn. (atlanticmach.com) has been importing and distributing high quality Italian machinery since 1984. Among the equipment are FIN brand manual and automatic roller or disc conveyors that are available in 4x8, 4x10 and 5x12 configurations. A woodworker can vary the speed on the automated ones from 15 to 95 feet per minute, and there’s an electronic eye brake as an option.

Uline (uline.com) may be a good conveyor solution for small shops on a tighter budget. The company is the leading distributor of shipping, industrial and packaging materials to businesses throughout North America, and the catalog carries light duty, heavy duty and extra-wide conveyors, along with expanding mobile units that can follow a curve. Uline’s gravity skate wheel conveyors have axles every 3" to support even small parts such as drawer sides, and they come in lengths up to 36 feet and widths up to 30".

Barbaric (barbaric.at) in Linz, Austria, has its U.S. headquarters in Wake Forest, N.C. Woodshop owners may be familiar with the company’s booths at shows such as IWF Atlanta, where the family-run business has demonstrated several interesting material handling tools for woodworkers. The product line ranges from manual vacuum lifters for solid wood to fully automatic panel storage and retrieval systems for sheet stock. Barbaric makes a number of specialized lifting devices such as the RWL RackLifter that loads and unloads vertical panel saws. And the company also offers panel sorting and sheet good inventory management systems.

CNC operators are familiar with the concept of pendulum loading. Biesse (biesse.com) describes it as allowing an operator to load and unload parts at one end of the bed while the machine works at the other end. This means the machine is never sitting idle, and the operator isn’t wasting time watching the machine and waiting for it to finish its cycle. Now Biesse has introduced multi-panel pendulum loading on its Rover series of CNC machines. The number of parts that can be worked on at any given time is limited only by the physical size of the bed or the number of pods and rails. So, a large machine may be able to accommodate up to eight workpieces (four on each side) at a time. This makes it viable to machine an entire unit (a cabinet for example), as a single batch rather than machining multiple quantities of each component part one after the other. In doing so, it dramatically reduces the amount of material handling required.

Dalmec (dalmec.com), an Italian manufacturer, has a location in Bloomingdale, Ill., and among its products is the Mandrel manipulator. This is a vacuum lift that can be steered around by hand, so the operator can place items easily without lifting. Dalmec makes 11 models that lift weights from 6 to 1,500 kg.

Hendrick Mfg. (hendrickmanufacturing.com) offers the Vaculex vacuum lift designed to “help operators pluck heavy materials up and onto elevated surfaces much more easily, while offering maximum flexibility in movement, so they work in countless unique setups that a lift table may not accommodate,” according to the company. Vaculex is part of the Swedish company TAWI AB, which offers a wide range of material handling solutions.

Hermance Machine Co. is now part of Wurth Baer (wurthbaermachinery.com), which offers a number of material handling options including vacuum lifts from Schmalz, material handling tables from TigerStop, panel carts, and sheet good skates.

The Store-Master 5110 from Holz-Her USA (holzherusa.com) is designed to minimize personnel and organizational expenses for handling panels in the woodshop, even for a wide variety of panels and decorative finishes. Panels are selected by a computer during removal, and they can be rotated easily and stored in any direction.

JTL (jamesltaylor.com) in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., offers a range of material handling return conveyors that allow one operator to tend a machine. They eliminate the need to catch and stack finished parts on edge banders, wide belt sanders, straight line rip saws, and more.

Carts can be so much more than a platform with wheels. Martin Woodworking Machine (martin-usa.com) carries a line of Barth carts that have both vacuuming and lifting capabilities. There are two assembly tables and five lifting tables in the line, and they can all be adjusted to match the height of machines or employees. The Barth VakuuCar+ is a manual, mobile workbench with a power strip, mechanical clamps, vacuum clamps, a tilting table, a foot-controlled vacuum pump, an expandable work surface, and room for tool storage. Other options include drawers and containers. And the VacuuLift-S is a lifting table with three flat vacuum suction cups. Its foot pump can switch automatically between quick and lifting strokes, so the table can raise or lower quickly, or in a fine adjustment manner.

The new Rangate Lift Cart 300 (rangate.com) can lift up to 660 lbs. It operates with a foot bar and has two locking wheels. It doesn’t come with a top, as most users want to design their own. That’s an increasingly popular option with worktables since the evolution of clamps that work in sliding dovetailed slots, or in tops that have a grid of drilled peg holes.

The Bora PM-1850 Panel Carrier/Infeed Table (boratool.com) allows a single woodworker to roll full sheets across the woodshop, tilt them on the swiveling platform, lock them in a horizontal position, and then slide them sideways to feed a machine such as a table saw. It has 7” wheels and the vertical orientation lets it pass through interior doorways. The PM-1850 can handle two sheets of 3/4" plywood simultaneously.

A trio of handy material handling devices from Infinity Cutting Tools (infinitytools.com) includes the Gorilla Gripper for picking up sheets of plywood or MDF; FastCap’s Speed Skate (fastcap.com) for rolling large sheets on edge across the woodshop; and Infinity’s own Leg UP that clamps onto the left end of a table saw’s rip fence guide, making use of the fact that the guide is a hollow metal tube. A long arm with a hook on the end hangs down, and the woodworker pops one side of a sheet of plywood onto this. Then it’s just a matter of tilting the sheet onto the table with no heavy lifting involved.

One of the most challenging aspects of material handling for small shops without a forklift is moving panels, sheets and even countertops across thresholds, gravel and other obstacles. Saw Trax Mfg. (sawtrax.com) makes a range of jobsite and shop dollies and carts with large wheels and customizable retaining bars.

Material handling isn’t just about moving loads vertically to load a machine, or horizontally to stack them across the shop. It’s also about rotating. Southworth Products (southworthproducts.com) points out how a simple device like an industrial turntable can increase worker productivity. Repositioning the load rather than the worker saves time, reduces fatigue and eliminates hazards caused by walking around the load. The Maine manufacturer offers a wide variety of industrial turntables, including manual versions that can be easily spun by a worker even when loaded to capacity. There are also electric turntables that rotate loads at the touch of a button. Either style can be placed directly on the floor, on a fixed height platform, or mounted on a lift table. Southworth also makes a round turntable that sits on the shop floor, where a loaded pallet jack can be rolled onto it and then rotated so that long loads like plywood can be pushed around sharp corners.

Stiles Machinery (stilesmachinery.com) notes that as the number of automated machines increases on the shop floor, material handling equipment and practices are becoming a more crucial part of production. To respond to that need, Stiles carries a number of Doucet machines for flipping, returning, stacking, unstacking, feeding, storing, retrieving, lifting and moving whole and partial sheets, along with casework parts and fronts. Many of these solutions are machine specific, such as the Kentwood Advantage Rip Series which allows shops working with solid wood to get the most from rip saws. It adds AI defect scanning, infeed and outfeed automation, and optimization software, among other features.

Voorwood Precision Machinery (voorwood.com) makes several return conveyors in right or left configurations, 24″ or 36″ widths, and for single-phase power needs. The steel rollers are individually driven by welded urethane belts, and speeds can range from 5 to 100 feet per minute.

Air tables are a relatively expensive but very helpful option for material handling. They are typically used with an edge bander or panel saw, or at the end of a return conveyor. These are positive air pressure cabinets that let heavy parts glide effortlessly across their tops on a cushion of air. Quebec-based Doucet Machineries (doucetinc.com) offers air tables in different configurations for handling large and heavy panels. Some models include a variable height feature, which means that they can be used by an operator to transfer a panel from one piece of equipment to the next at different working heights. Doucet’s air tables can also be custom designed in a variety of sizes and shapes (including an L) to suit specific needs.

Material handling solutions from the Manitou Group (manitou.com), a French company, are widely distributed in North America. They include forklifts, telescoping and rotating handlers, truck-mounted forklifts, articulated loaders, and skid loaders with features that are adapted to wood handling work. This line is perhaps more familiar at the earlier stages of production in mills and yards, but Manitou products are also used to transport heavy loads and pallets, remove sawdust, and load pallets.

Shops that lay up veneer panels are already familiar with Sweed Inc., (sweed.com) in southern Oregon. The company makes scrap choppers, recycling systems, and automated machines for veneer and panel manufacturers that use vacuum systems.

Muratec (muratec-usa.com) is a harbinger of changes to come in the woodworking industry. The company makes a robotic Compact Shuttle that will pick up a pallet and take it where it needs to go. It can turn on a dime and operate in small spaces. It has independent 360-degree rotation and a turntable on top. Smart and compact, it has multi-unit controls to enable pallet loading from any direction, with a maximum capacity of 2,200 lbs.

Shop owners who are looking for ways to store solid wood and sheet goods might wish to visit the website of Warehouse Rack & Shelf (rackandshelf.com). This company supplies lumber racks to big box stores – the ones that carry full bunks of plywood and long construction lumber. The catalog also includes other material handling solutions such as millwork racks with dividers for storing moldings, and lots of carts and rack systems.

And finally, Grizzly Industrial (grizzly.com) offers a wide range of material handling solutions. One of those options is a 2-ton manual forklift called the Bear-Lift Pro Pallet Stacker (item T31643). This is perfect for small warehouses and allows stacking of pallets two-high without a forklift truck. It fits a standard 42" pallet, and the 35" long forks are adjustable to fit narrower pallets too. There’s a welded steel chassis with heavy-duty smooth-rolling wheels, and a dual-action hydraulic lift that can easily move pallets up to 4,000 lbs.

Originally published in the January 2025 issue of Woodshop News.