Loading Dock Equipment

In today's commercial work environment, few things are more important to making things run smoothly than the simple transportation of goods between entities. These days, most of the things used every day come from all over the country and around the world - whether that be milk, eggs, bread, gasoline, cars, tires, or anything else you can imagine. There are many different industries involved in selling stuff to us - there's the production of the items, the selling of the items, and of course, the middleman: getting the product from the producer to the consumer.

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What is a Loading Dock?
In America, the majority of overland transportation occurs by truck. Even if a product takes a voyage first in an airplane, train or cargo ship, it usually ends up taking a ride in some kind of truck. If you look at any retail store of reasonable size or at the enormous warehouses many companies use as middle points to collect product before shipping it to retail locations across the country, you’re going to find facilities to move product from the truck into the store or warehouse. That’s not easy – it takes a lot of workers to move individual boxes, and it would really be a pain if people were just picking things up out of the back of the truck and carrying it in through the front door; thus, the invention of the loading dock. In a single-truck kind of facility, a loading dock generally consists of a large door for the truck to back up to and a roller rack to quickly and efficiently move things from the truck to the ground. Product is usually placed on palettes that can then be easily moved with a forklift or pneumatic cart.

Equipment and Techniques in Large Loading Docks
Larger loading docks, such as those used in large warehouses, malls, or the various “super” retail centers that seem to be popping up everywhere these days, often need a little more than just a door and loading ramp. Obviously, one of the main difficulties in unloading freight from a truck is the height of the truck. Most truck beds are several feet off the ground. Because of this, many loading bay designs have ramps leading up to the standard truck bed level. This isn’t always precisely the right height, and there’s still a gap between the truck and the edge of the dock. For that reason, many loading bays use a piece of equipment called a dock leveler to bridge the gap and make it easy for a forklift to drive directly into the back of a truck and offload entire palettes of product with very little difficulty. Imagine the difference between unloading a truck by hand as opposed to moving tons of material at a time with a forklift, and you’ll see just how important good loading dock equipment is.

Yard Ramps
Sometimes, unfortunately, there are middle grounds between small establishments and the very big ones. In those cases, you might not have a fully outfitted loading dock or even good loading dock equipment, but still have a truck that’s too large to unload easily by hand with only a few workers. In those cases, you might want to get a piece of loading dock equipment called a yard ramp. A yard ramp works when the loading dock doors aren’t of the right sort to work directly with the back of a truck, or can even be used with the loading dock door if there is no concrete door or dock leveler available to allow the forklift into the truck. Loading dock design that makes use of yard ramps should take loading dock safety into consideration in its design.

A yard ramp is simply a long – usually ten or twelve yards – ramp that extends from the ground into the bed of the cargo truck. That ramp allows a forklift to ascend safely into a truck and easily offload palettes even without some of the heavier pieces of loading dock equipment. Always take loading dock safety into consideration when working with a yard ramp. A person can walk up a ramp into a truck without any trouble at all. A thousand-pound forklift carrying a two-ton crate of cleaning fluid, on the other hand, might have a little more trouble. Make sure a ramp is safely situated, because failure to do so puts your equipment and, more importantly, your employees at risk.

Forklifts
One of the most important pieces of loading dock equipment any loading dock design can have is a forklift. Forklifts come in many shapes and sizes but are absolutely vital to efficient loading dock operation. Fork lifts allow very large, very heavy pallets of product to be easily moved by workers without a lot of extra effort. There are many things to consider when you’re looking at obtaining a forklift for your facility. How big are the pallets or crates you’ll be moving? Do you have the right kind of equipment you need to access a truck with it? Again, if you’re doing relatively light work you can get a relatively small forklift.

You can also get smaller hand-powered forklift devices often called pallet jacks. These operate on the same general principle as a forklift, but are cheaper and can be used to transport pallets through areas like crowded shopping malls or retail centers where an engine driven forklift would be inconvenient and impractical. They work by allowing you to roll the two fork tines into the corresponding space under the pallet. You can then use the handle as a pump to fill the hydraulic lift devices and lift the crate off the ground. The pallet can then be moved by simply pulling the pallet jack behind you.

Forklift Capacity and Lift Weight
The most important thing when dealing with loading dock equipment like forklifts, of course, is load limits. The average forklift is built to carry crates and pallets of a fairly standardized size, and so are generally built to support around one to five tons of product and to transport them easily. Some situations, of course, call for much heavier loads, and some forklifts are built to lift them. Machines capable of up to fifty tons have been used in the past.

Some problems with lift weight can be compensated by a fairly standard forklift feature that allows the mast to be tipped backwards to better support a great weight and to keep it from slipping off the tines. This also helps in uneven or angled terrain – when going down a ramp, for instance. There’s nothing worse than an entire pallet of glassware sliding off of a forklift’s tines and crashing into a mass of broken shards of glass all over the concrete. It’s for this reason that loading dock safety features like the angled mast feature were implemented in the first place.

Building and Designing a Loading Dock
When you’re building a building that’s going to need a loading dock you should design it with offloading large trucks in mind. There’s no telling just how much work and time you can save by building a good loading dock design to start with, and using that to provide the best and most efficient work solution for your new workplace. Hire a good architect, consult experts, and talk to people who are accustomed already to working loading docks to decide exactly how to build your new loading dock to give you the best solution for your new building and for the money you’ll be paying for it.

It’s important to consider what sort of loading dock equipment you’re going to need when you build your new loading dock. How big will it have to be? What kinds of product will you be moving? How close, if not attached, is it to the retail site? All of these things are very important to consider. All of these things also require different loading dock equipment – some of it very simple – in order to function properly. Dock bumpers, for instance, are placed on the walls below the loading dock doors so that semis and truck trailers can back up to the wall without damaging either the truck’s bumpers or the wall itself. These are simple things, easy to overlook, but can save a lot of money in trouble. Business is in the details.

Other Loading Dock Equipment
There are a lot of other little pieces of loading dock equipment which go into building a good, efficient loading dock environment. We’ve already talked about yard ramps, dock levelers, dock bumpers, and forklifts. Which, if any, of these tools do you need? If you offload a lot of product outside rather than directly into the building, a loading ramp may well be more useful to you. If, on the other hand, you intend to keep all your product inside – if it could be damaged by the rain or snow, for instance – then you’re going to have to install large loading dock doors of the truck to back up to and then set up a system you can use to remove the product from inside the truck onto the warehouse floor. It’s certainly not easy to get this just right, but if you do, you’re going to save you and your company a lot of time and money when it comes to moving product from manufacturer to consumer.

Things you may not consider as much as the obvious things like forklifts and truck ramps are the simpler loading dock equipment pieces needed for a good loading dock. Traffic doors, for instance, are two-way swinging doors meant to swing open easily at a touch – making it easy for people pushing carts or driving forklifts to move through without hassle. Handcarts – what will make it easy for your workers to move product off of pallets and onto store floors? Will you put the pallets themselves out and then work off of them, or will you move product from the back out into the store? There’s a lot more to good loading dock operation than just equipment. Make sure you have a good plan too.

Special Loading Dock Equipment
Some loading docks have needs specific to the location. A few trucks and cargos, for instance, require an airtight seal between truck and building. You can buy an airtight door seal from many producers of loading dock equipment and install it on your building to provide easy, safe access between truck and building. Depending on the cargo, your best and safest option may be to go with the better equipment and ensure safety. Loading dock safety is vital – far more than just the numbers on the budget sheet. You can’t put a price on the lives of your workers.

A simpler version is a basic rain cover for the space between truck and building. That can keep the water off of the product and off of the workers unloading the truck. If you work with a lot of cardboard in an area with a lot of rain, a rain cover for the loading dock doors might be a very good idea indeed.

Loading Dock Safety
The most important part of loading dock use and construction is, of course, loading dock safety. No matter what else you do with your loading dock, make sure that above all else your workers and yourself are safe. Make sure all of your ramps are in working order and won’t collapse when a lot of weight is driven up or down them. Make sure your doors operate smoothly. Make sure, if you need airtight door seals, that they really are airtight. Check machinery regularly, and keep everything in top working condition. Emphasize safety to your workers, and make sure they know how to contribute to a safe working environment. The safer they are, the less likely they will be to have a serious injury. For purely financial reasons, it’ll save you money on workman’s comp, but far more importantly, your workers themselves will be safe.


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