Welcome back everyone, Marty here with Warehouse and Operations as a Career and I\u2019m back in Dallas Texas this week, it\u2019s nice getting caught back up with regular business and visiting with some local accounts. I was up North, well I guess I need to call it North Western area last week and found it quite cold for my taste, yes I\u2019m a warmer weather soul without a doubt. I had a question presented a few weeks ago about Cherry Pickers, what is a cherry picker and is it the same thing as a hi lo machine. I\u2019m most familiar with using the cherry picker or hi rise machine in the food service distribution side of things so let\u2019s talk about that for a bit.
\nIf your purchasing such a piece of equipment it may be called an Order Picker \u2013 Stock Picker or Stock picker truck these days. When checking them out on You Tube you can search with Order Picker and find some great videos on them. I\u2019ve heard them referred to as HighRise Machines HighRise Pickers, Cherry Pickers and even High Lows before. Check out You Tube, there\u2019s some great tutorials and videos of them in use on there. These Order Picker Trucks are used a lot in the furniture industry, theirs a pretty slick square platform made for them where you can slide an item from the slot onto the platform and bring it down with the Cherry Picker. In larger distribution centers they can be used in narrow aisle environments for the smaller wares or items. As we know a typical pallet bay or the area or slots between two uprights we\u2019ll find two slots for two pallets to be placed side by side, either straight in, the 40-inch front or sideways on the 48 inch side or 4 way side facing out, with a bay or beam of either 96 inches or 102 inches usually, at least around here. Anyway, with a cherry picker area or department you can have several pick facings like 9 per bay and the slot may be only like 2ft high or something like that, meaning you can have many slots in the aisle. I\u2019ve seen these areas being 28 feet high. As you can see, in one aisle you could have many hundreds or thousands of items in them depending on how long your aisles are. These areas are built for just such a machine.
\nOperating an Order Picker or cherry picker isn\u2019t to difficult and the learning curve is pretty short. Controls wise there\u2019s only a few. Usually a vertical steering wheel, flat mounted on the wall of the driving compartment, typically operated with the left hand and then a forward and reverse lever or roll throttle with up and down buttons within reach of the right hand. The only other necessary button needed is the horn of course! In \u201988 my Order Picker was Rail Driven, meaning I steered it out on the docks and turning from aisle to aisle or coming out of one aisle and into another. But as I would enter an aisle I threaded my right outrigger onto a Rail which kept my truck straight as I would drive forward and up or down to the next pick slot. Many of today\u2019s equipment are wire guided, or follow a wire in the flooring and some are computer guided to the individual slots even. Technology\u2019s come a long way since I was Selecting. Here\u2019s a great place for me to slide in one of my favorite points which as you know is to Never get on or even touch any piece of powered industrial equipment that you have not been trained and certified to do so. Remember, any piece of equipment is dangerous, we must know how to properly operate it before we can use it. Some of today models have light kits and automatic pallet locks, oh I\u2019ve even seen a few with Fan kits on the driver\u2019s platform to cool us off in the warmer months.
\nI went online, again some of that self-education stuff and found several pictures of the machines, I\u2019ll add a couple of links in the show notes at warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com if you\u2019d like to see one.
\nhttp://www.crown.com/en-us/forklifts/sp-stockpicker.html
\n https://www.toyotaforklift.com/forklifts/6-series-order-picker
\n https://www.