Hi

My company, Face Consultants, specialise in the design, specification and testing of warehouse and industrial floors. In designing a floor you will need to know the point load and size of contact area that load transfers onto the floor. In our experience we have always requested this information from the forklift truck manufacturer as the wheels will be subject to different loads depending where the carrying load is located. Take for example a narrow aisle truck; when the pallet (load) is in front of the truck the overall load will be even on the front two wheels. However when the forks are extended to place the pallet in the racks the loads will be uneven. The wheel on the side in which the load is being placed in the rack will have the greater load. This becomes the critical load and therefore will have the wheel with the greatest compression and largest contact area. We have found that only the forklift truck manufacturer will know this as he knows the load of the truck, the designed carrying load and the actual material the wheels are made from.

Not being a salesman I do not have access to the technical data that all OEM reps would be able to supply you. From a service perspective I can tell you that it is crucial to pay attention to floor flatness especialy when installing wire guidance in VNA aplications. We have seen customers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on regrinding floors because at full speed the operator up forklifts were smashing into the racking at 40 feet in the air due to poor floor conditins. After the grinding we still had to keep the speeds under 5 miles per hour to avoid guidance problems magnified by high speed wobbles. Write back if I can assist any more.