What do you do when you are challenged with a need to transport, store and retrieve a wide range of size, shape and dimension loads? Add the fact that you require the versatility to unload trailers, travel up inclines, through narrow doorways, both indoor and outdoor and often on uneven surfaces. Top it all off with the fact that you have a need to create more space with little or no room to grow. Well, this is exactly the challenge that Truckee Tahoe Lumber faced.

DREXEL SwingMast^® Lift Truck - the one truck that does it all!
 
Truckee Tahoe Lumber in Tahoe City, California is an approximately 4,000- 5,000 sq. foot facility that sits in the main street of town near the shore of Lake Tahoe. The business serves both commercial and residential markets and has grown substantially over the past years. Because land is a premium in this popular resort community and the business was land locked on all sides, they needed a more efficient way to store their product in the existing facility. Handling long and awkward pieces of lumber and plywood through doorways had been done manually up to this point.
 
The company had considered the use of two different pieces of equipment (lift trucks): a sideloader to handle the loads through doorways and inside the warehouse and a conventional lift truck to feed the sideloader working outside unloading trailers and flatbeds. This was a favorable alternative over the manual method but also costly to purchase and maintain two different machines.
 
Bob Rearick of Clarklift Team Power in Reno, Nevada introduced the Drexel SwingMast model R-60-SL lift truck, a 6,000 lb internal combustion truck with solid pneumatic style tires and a clean burning diesel engine. The SwingMast operates as a conventional front loading lift truck as well as both a Very Narrow Aisle and Sideloading vehicle. Truckee visited an existing SwingMast application at the LA Dept of Water and Power and the decision was easy.
 
"The R-60-SL works great for handling Truckee's long loads in the lumber yard. It's the perfect answer for carrying the loads through the doorway and storing them in the warehouse. The pneumatic design allows the lift truck to work on the uneven surfaces to load and unload trucks in the crowded yard area," says Bob Rearick. Truckee has reduced the time they spent restocking by 50% and all in all the space savings gained are better than expected and the customer is very happy with the Drexel product.