The Bristol Port Company has invested in two Combilift 4-way forklifts after winning a storage contract with a North American timber company.
The firm bought the the trucks in order to improve its storage density for the increased volume of timber to be handled.
The Combilifts work in a section of its recently expanded Forest Products Terminal which offers 100,000 sqm of warehousing adjacent to berths and have replaced counterbalance trucks which were previously being used.
Development engineer Paul Osborne, said: ““Since we started this contract we have had to adapt to a much larger workload, but to maintain the flexibility which our customers prize we did not want to install racking across the designated 10,000 m² storage area.
“We therefore kept the block stacking system but needed to reduce aisle widths to create maximum storage space. The Combilifts’ 4-way ability enables them to work in narrow confines as well as to block stack and we can now accommodate a good 30 per cent more packs than we could have achieved with counterbalance trucks.”