Hi all

Those responsible for a workplace are required to provide the training, knowledge, skills, equipment, protective gear, procedures and culture to ensure the workplace is safe.

Those providing training are required to assist in the achievement of the goal of a safe workplace by being very careful in the information and training they provide.

THe two most basic points in forklift training are for the operator to check/determine the rating of his forklift in respect of the load to be lifted and for the operator to check the weight of the load to make sure it does not exceed the forklift rating. And as all of us invovled in training and retraining know very few operators, experienced or not, can tell you the actual ratings of their forklifts or the weight of the heaviest loads they lift.

By implication all of us trainers and all of the workplace managers and supervisors have totally failed in the most basic task of ensuring forklift operators do not overload their forklifts.

And along with that goes all the things we see to regularly - forklifts with missing rating plates, forklifts with unreadable rating plates, forklifts where the rating plates do not have ratings for the attachments used on them, forklifts where a clipboard had been installed over the rating plate (Simple solution to this problem - don't have the rating plate where a clipboard will be installed - in fact you should never have a rating plate on an engine cover because in sites with lots of forklifts you may have the same forklift with different ratings because of mast and/or attachment differences - if the engine covers on both are removed they may be reinstalled on the wrong forklift) et cetera.

And we have charts on some forklifts showing the loss in capacity with increased distance - but many forklift drivers cannot read graphs - if communication was to be maximised you'd have a table with distances and ratings for the forklift as fitted with its normal attachment. this would require load tables to be customised to each forklift.

And of course every site should have at least one forklift with a weighing scale (one of the larger ones) so that if there is a query it can be used to check the weight before it is moved off a truck.

So perhaps we need to put our efforts into this area rather than the nuance of a "rule of thumb"