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mpohl

German Forklifting is Brutal as Fuck.

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Not wanting to take this to Speaker's Corners. But only in the freest country of the world, #1, numero uno,...are you not allowed to say "Shit." Or that a hot co-worker is hot!!!

Oh well...happy and safe forklifting for us all!

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hmmmm..I wonder if rob zombie directed this 'safety video'. Also have to love work related videos that say 'shit' in them. :P

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I used to be a forklift driver.
I was damn good. Never crashed. I also used to use it to win bets, by picking up a dime, putting it in a dixie cup, then picking up the dixie cup and putting it on top of a post.

To anyone wondering how thats possible, think Tiddlywinks.

We also used to have this mexican clamp truck driver. Thats a forklift with an enormous vertical clamp instead of forks, for picking up clumps of boxes and other bulk items. I never knew this guy's name, I just called him Clampy, but he was damn good at the art of Forklift Jousting, where you use your truck to try to immobilize the other guy's truck... either by pinning it in a corner or getting a fork under the other truck and picking up one of the other guy's drive wheels. I had me a standup truck, which was far more maneuverable and a good deal quicker, but Clampy's toyota had a weight and power advantage and was difficult to escape with the clamp open wide.

There were some seriously epic battles in that factory, the roar and clash of fighting forklifts, the clang of steel on steel, the whine of hydraulics and chatter of contactors, the smell of roasted tire rubber... those were the days. Anybody who's ever seen the famous Loader Fight Scene from Aliens where Ripley uses a walking forklift to beat the snot out of a 10-ton alien queen knows how glorious industrial equipment combat can be.

And we always wore safety glasses. Safety First!
-B
Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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Nope, the plant closed about 9 years back due to excessive equipment maintenance expenses. Replacing the armor plate and tires in between rounds wasn't cheap.

/comic mode off/

Seriously though, they should have shown that video there. Most of the other drivers were completely untrained illegals from all over South America with no english and no concept of the damage a forklift can do, and I saw some stunningly stupid things done at that plant.

They were trying to keep the plant alive by replacing the locals with illegal temps... no bennies, treated as if they were disposable, get injured, get discarded. And the guys themselves didn't help, they did everything they could to make the place a third-world environment... graffiti carved into things, peeing in the corners, litter everywhere, stealing all the tools...

And a third-world safety record.

That video was no joke... we had several incidents... no shit, it happened more than once... where these guys would show off how casual they were by jumping off the truck while it was still moving. And more than once, we had a guy run himself over with his own forklift. Guy jumps off, puts a foot wrong or slips, 5 ton truck runs over his foot... foot gets squished out the sides of the poor guy's sneakers.
The spatter effect goes about 10 feet in all directions. Its not easy to look at.

They were just as bad with the Standups. Their favorite way to drive was to stand in the compartment backward, defeating the deadman pedal with the off foot, while hanging the other foot half out the compartment, driving backward. Inevitably, one of these guys hung a tight corner through a doorway, and clipped half his foot off against the doorway. They picked up the half of the guy's sneaker that was lying on the floor, and half of his foot fell out.

I wore heavy Caterpillar construction boots with a 2500-lb impact crush rating, kept arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times, and I kept my head on a swivel. That place was dangerous.
-B
Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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