[Robert] does a fair bit of metal casting, and of course that implies carrying around hundreds of pounds of sand, scrap, and other materials. He came up with a great service to the inevitable back pain: a small, workshop-sized forklift able to carry around a half ton pallet.

In the actual build thread for this forklift, [Robert] reviews the design. The lift is developed to fit inside a 30″ x 7′ door frame, but is much more than capable of hoisting hundreds of pounds over the operator’s head. It’s driven by two electric wheelchair motors with power offered by two car batteries. There’s also a smart bit of engineering that went into tipping the forks: instead of a hinge on the mast, [Robert] used a linear actuator on the rear wheels to put the forks at an angle.

It’s a great build, and because [Robert] does metal casting, there’s a whole bunch of customized metalwork that really adds to the build. After the break you can see a video of [Robert]’s forklift transferring a pallet weighed down with 5 gallon buckets from one really high shelf to another. The job doesn’t take long and doesn’t require any lifting, so we’ve got to hand it to [Robert] for this build.