The easiest way to think of preventative maintenance of your forklift is the same as brushing your teeth. If you don’t’ get your forklift serviced – (brush your teeth) – then you are going to get damage to your forklift, that could have been prevented by being picked up earlier and the damage reduced thus causing you to get large bills for repair – Go to the dentist, and get your teeth filled. And we all know how much that costs.

Internal Combustion engines require regular servicing.

They need clean air – to breath – and remove damaging particles from the air – that’s why we change air filters at every service.

They need clean oil. The oil is the lubricant that travels all through the moving parts of the engine keeping these parts lubricated and away from each other under pressure. If these is low oil pressure, these parts will touch and wear on each other which can cause catastrophic failure, therefore requiring engine replacement or repair.

The oil also picks up all the contaminates generated by combustion etc and conveys then to the oil filter where the oil is filtered. But over time the oil becomes dirty and will need to be changed and as well as they filter.

New spark plugs are fitted at service to all LPG and petrol engine, which increase efficiency through more complete combustion. Which leads to less contaminates.

Diesel units and petrol units will have fuel filters changed – cleaner fuel again means less contaminates and again better combustion.

In electric units the unit need to be blown out. Dust is the major killer of electrical components, boards, switches and motors. Blowing them out is vital for a long service life.

Batteries can be checked at service, not only for water levels to see that they are being maintained by staff for management, but corrosion on terminals, swelling of cell cases etc. Item of which only a trained technician would pick up on.

Your forklift is made up of lots of moving parts from steering pivot bushes, pins , mast pivots etc etc.

All these parts need to be greased regularly. The grease lubricates the contacting surfaces. The grease gets pushed out over time and picks up contaminates. When a unit is serviced, new grease is pumped into these parts, lubricating these parts and pushing out the old grease.

A lack of grease will cause the contacting surface not to be lubricated and rubbing/grinding on each other causing wear in these vital components. With may require disassembly – ( High Labour Costs ) and these parts are not designed to be replaced regularly so their replacement cost will be high. And as these parts begin to wear, they will be out of designed tolerance, and begin to wear more heavily and cause wear in other areas of the forklift also. Cascading again in higher and higher cost unless the forklift is inspected and checked regularly – Preventative Maintenance Servicing, where inspections are carried out and these problems and issues can be found early and remedied and repaired before spiralling into huge costs or damage that is just uneconomical to repair and requires the forklift to be tagged out as unsafe and be replaced.

Or worse still cause an accident and or injury to staff, stock or building. Upon which the incident and forklift will be investigated by Workplace Health and Safety.

If the forklift has not been maintained properly and at timely intervals, ( proper records should be kept and available ), then management and company could be held liable for injuries and claims. Seek legal advise for clarification. Also Insurance Carrier clarification of why maintenance was not carried out could lead to claim problems.

It is far better to maintain the forklift properly at 250 hours intervals or 6 months depending on your forklift and its manufacture recommendations. Location, environment and usage factors all contribute to service interval requirements.

Proper servcing stops major wear, will allow us to check moving parts and surfaces and to change wear parts out. For example, side shift wear pads, that are designed to wear out, to be sacrifical, so they can be changed out and protect the far more expensive and labour intensive side shift carriage replacement.

Again the dentist analogy, it is far cheaper to servcie your forkli – Brush your teeth and let it detirotae until those nasty costly and painful bills arrive.