They spend the whole time beeping their horn at every opportunity, but then when they beep to signal to the driver to stop, or that they’ve finished, or they need a strap moving etc they expect the driver to realise they are beeping for that reason.
I want to find the bloke who made that bit of health and safety that says fork lift drivers need to beep the horn when coming out of any building or driving round a trailer and install a horn at his house that beeps every single time he moves.
Did my FLT licence last year, this is one of the video’s we had to watch and one of the reasons forkie’s have to constantly beep their horns. Pretty horrible vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m_DOPex3CQ
While that’s a nasty video, if the driver/pedestrian was wondering around so aimlessly you have to ask if a beeping horn would have really helped.
You can’t legislate against idiots.
I’d say the problem in that video isn’t the use of horn, or lack of it, because I guessing that was the point they made to you? Look at what happens when the horn isn’t used kind of thing.
The problem here is the fork lift driver is driving blind. He simply can’t see where he is going. He needs to lower that load or reverse so he can see. He could have hit anyone or anything like that, which he did.
Timely post this
I was delivering a few loads of flt’s to the new nicepak site on Wigan yesterday, I drove one off the wagon beeped the horn to go into the building a contractor carrying timber on his shoulder casually walked right on front of me, just a tad faster and I would have got him
Anyway, the site boss man saw him and went nuts on him, his excuse was they where told to wear ear defender’s on that part of site due to drilling and health and safety, so he didn’t hear me.
It’s a bit like the good old boy that cried wolf story.
Because they constantly beep when they are moving, when they actually beep to warn a person they are going to get hit you take no notice because it’s just another beep.
Because of the horn issue and reversing beeper noise being so common is not noticed all our flt’s are being sold with hi beam blue spot lights, they show a blue spot on the floor in front and behind the flt as a visual aid for others to know a flt is going your way either through a door or out of racking.
I though your link was going to be to this video.
I was actually shown that during my FLT course many years ago as a bit of light relief during the otherwise rather boring classroom part.
Would agree it’s a bit overkill most of the time, but I guess somewhere deep in the subconscious there’s a little message that says “hmm, fork lift around here somewhere” even if we don’t normally take any conscious notice.
For example, I spent two months working at the Boots site recently (as a contractor) and they have lots of full size fork lifts and electric pallet trucks all of which do the beep thing on every corner on the D10 building. Eventually you find your brain can filter out 95% of them except when they’re really close which is exactly the time you want to be alerted. Saved from being run over a few times by the pallet trucks at least as they’re like shunters on speed!
Drift:
Timely post this
I was delivering a few loads of flt’s to the new nicepak site on Wigan yesterday, I drove one off the wagon beeped the horn to go into the building a contractor carrying timber on his shoulder casually walked right on front of me, just a tad faster and I would have got him
Anyway, the site boss man saw him and went nuts on him, his excuse was they where told to wear ear defender’s on that part of site due to drilling and health and safety, so he didn’t hear me.
I spent some time in a refinery where you had to wear a primarily audible gas detector on you at all times, yet some area’s required you to wear double hearing protection of buds and muffs, so u didn’t have a hope in hell of hearing it over that and the noise of the area!
Rat67:
Did my FLT licence last year, this is one of the video’s we had to watch and one of the reasons forkie’s have to constantly beep their horns. Pretty horrible vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m_DOPex3CQ
Not a nice video at all, maybe it should have a bit more warning on the content, it is a large FLT not a smaller FLT and some people may not realise how bad it it actually is. Just my opinion of course but I found it a bit squeamish and I’m not overly squeamish.
But after an incident like that you have to feel for all involved, especially the FLT driver, there has to be a reason why he was travelling forwards with a large load and not reversing so he could see what was in front of him. If not then why the hell was he doing it?
