Hello, I only discovered & registered for this site today. I agree fully with original post by vic k that operator training should reflect the real world. I have been a Telehandler operator since 1999 & the company i worked for at that time sent me for Telehandler training. When I did my assesment for it it started of with 3 cubes of concrete, 1 was set on a tower, 1 at the top of a hill, & 1 onto a lorry body, then all lifted down & stacked up. During the actual training course about 75% of the practical training time went into lifting the said blocks on & of the tower & lorry body. The training in no way reflected the jobs the operator is faced with on site. The 2nd lift I did after training was roof trusses onto 2 storey houses. I had no idea about using a jib on the machine as it wasn't covered during the course. The course (apart from the "hill" bit) didn't cover using the loaded machine over rough terrain etc. Operators courses all seem to be geared towards the "ideal world" scenario which rarely occurs in any workplace. As for the "handbrake" thing, I would rarely just it except to park the machine up, if i had a cage for lifting people in on the machine, (although in this case the jacks woulb be down anyway), or if waiting for roofers, brickies, etc to take stuff off pallets or the forks.

Bryan